How can you make objective IT investment decisions?

A better way of describing this process is agreeing what you need to do to get you to the agreed future vision. For IT to support the organisational strategy you will need to exist in a future state. What tech and people capabilities support that future state? What have you got? What haven't you got? Where are the gaps? Running alongside that future state what do you need to do to manage the now? What supports your operations? What is missing or broken? Where are your risks? Create your investment portfolio to support all these aims, look at what you have today and then decide what to start, stop or continue.

Categories are useful here to allow you to manage appropriate investments: - Compliance - work I need to do to keep out of jail. - Mandatory - work I need to do to keep the lights on (KSOR - Keep Show On Road). - Strategic - work I need to do to take us to or allow us to succeed in the future state vision. - Discretionary - work that has business benefit but is more tactical in nature. The next question is how much do you need in each bucket? This comes down to organisational strategy, organisational performance and organisational risk appetite and will be unique to your organisation. One likely truth is that you will need to allocate more dollars to Compliance, Mandatory and also discretionary than you think.

With the aforementioned categories you can save time in not assessing Compliance and Mandatory. For Strategic and Discretionary a framework is recommended. Whatever you choose focus on quality and training so that you use it properly. Agree who makes the investment decisions and create a Terms of Reference / Charter as to how they operate and make decisions - and then enforce those rules to keep them honest. Don't chase the shiny thing. Finally. Do not, under any circumstances, say yes to all the investment requests at the start of the process. One truth is that you will run out money and you will have to make trade off decisions. It is easier to say no to a project than to stop one in flight.

Always assess the return of investment of a particular project in advance. Weighing the pros and cons of replacing current or implementing new infrastructure. Think of ways improving the I.T. Infrastructure and its automation infrastructure so that it saves time for the organization and its' employees. A few minutes saved on an automated task over a day can mean hours of time-saved in a month in which an organization can gain additional time for productivity while allowing the I.T. Resources to be dedicated where it's needed most.

You must have an enterprise investment decisions board. IT needs the support of the enterprise and it is your business stakeholders that must sponsor and realise the value from the investments. This board is also a great forum for educating on the work that needs to be done to keep the business running. It helps to demystify IT.

Involving stakeholders is the key to success for the I.T. Department in any organization. One of the sole purpose and functions of I.T. is to provide customer service while providing technical support to users. Always keep your users informed of any upcoming changes or critical infrastructure failures/outages. When improving current infrastructure make a justification by presenting transparent return on investment results weighing both pros and cons. Finally, make sure that extensive pre- and post-testing is completed and before a new device, application is deployed.

IT, via a PMO or other governance options needs to be accountable for the health of the deliveries. This reporting needs to be accurate and with insights that investment decisions makers can understand, react to and steer the portfolio. Business sponsors need to be accountable for the realisation of the value delivered. Most organisations require an uplift in maturity on value setting and measuring. Start simple and mature upwards from there.

Always remember that IT investment is not just something new that you need to build up. IT investment is also the maintenance and potential upgrades to existing applications and components of your IT architecture. Often this is overlooked and in case if stakeholders forgotten or ignored. New IT investments will require maintenance investments in the future which need to be taken into account as part of the financial evaluation.

Always keep an inventory of current I.T. assets, identify areas where improvements need to be made, and always remember to have as few as Single Point of Failures as possible while making sure that there are contingency plans in place should infrastructure fail.