The one true way to prove IT’s value to your CEO

When I was a CIO, I always dreaded the annual budget season because I knew, somewhere during the process, the CEO, my boss, would ask, “What are we getting for this constantly growing IT department.”

It’s a question that keeps most CIOs up at night when asked to defend IT investments, and it’s one all CIOs should expect to answer, given that IT expenditures can range from 1% to more than 50% of a company’s total revenue.

For most IT departments, this is a very difficult question to answer because the systems that we develop are not used by IT but are used by other departments to increase their sales, reduce their expenses, or be more competitive in the marketplace.

As such, an IT leader’s usual response to this question is a general statement about how IT has implemented projects across the corporation that have achieved corporate strategic objectives. We seldom have any empirical data to back up our claims. So what’s a CIO to do?

IT as a business

There are two ways to address this issue. The first option is to transition from a non-charge out environment, where IT absorbs all development costs, to a charge out environment where all IT costs are assigned to the user departments based on their use of the resources. In this case, IT operates as a zero-cost department and there are no annual budget issues. All IT has to do is tell the user departments how much to budget for IT.

But there are great downsides to this approach that far outweigh its ease of use for IT. First, this process tends to place the automation agenda into the hands of individual departments or profit centers rather than looking at IT and digitalization as an overall company necessity. An example of this would be the development of artificial intelligence systems. The ramifications of this sort of system would affect all departments.