Crunching the ROI numbers on Enterprise Systems Management automation
Posted by Rick Pandolfi on Tue, Feb 01, 2011 @ 12:20 PM
Crunching the ROI numbers on Enterprise Management System automation
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Mark Twain credited Benjamin Disreali with this fine coinage. But the research doesn’t bear this out. Wikipedia lists several possible alternative originators, including: Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Walter Bagehot, Arthur James Balfour and Leonard H. Courtney, but credits Twain with its popularization in 1906. So, let’s go with that because Twain was funny and American and I’ve never heard of the other fellows. I do intend to cite some of these aforementioned hyper lies which I would invite you to test with your gut and personal experience:
● More than 60% of annual IT cost is IT Staff. Of the remaining items that register none account for more than 25% and tellingly that is Downtime. Rounding out the findings are single digit laggards: Training, Software and Hardware.
● I can’t even help my 11 year old son with his math homework anymore, but I can calculate that IT costs are centered on Staff and Downtime to the tune of more than 85%.
● Meanwhile, the degree of Network Automation and Event Automation fail to crack the 25% threshold.
If I were a CFO
…and let’s all be very glad I’m not. But if I were, I’d be challenging our CIO about his or her efforts to drive down these numbers, especially if I knew that automation is devilishly cheap and has an off the charts Return on Investment (ROI).
Tomorrow, less lies and some guidance on the construction of a simple and illustrative ROI model to justify more IT Services Management automation. I won’t tell your CFO if you won’t, that you can start enjoying tremendous ROI for less than $50K and 30 days. But in the immortal words of #23, "Just Do IT".
Rick Pandolfi