IT survivor tip No. 3: Remember, it's just business
You know how in Mafia movies the hit man always says, "It's just business," right before he whacks his best friend?
Well, it is just business. And you need to know how the business makes money and what projects or systems are essential to that mission -- and get yourself assigned to them.
"Look at how your company is making its profit," says Finch. "You have to become indispensable to the success of that effort through adding real business value. Demonstrate through your timekeeping and meetings and activities that this is primarily what you are working on. Short-term revenue is more important than long-term in a down economy."
Getting the feeling your department needs to reduce head count? Come up with a plan for how to do it while keeping the lights on, and produce metrics to show how much money these cuts will save. If there's a line being drawn, you want to be standing on the same side as the CFO and the CEO, says Dave Taylor, co-founder of Sparxent, an IT management solutions vendor.
In other words: You're no longer a techie helping the business; you're a businessperson who uses tech to boost the bottom line.
"Transition your focus from technology to business value and business needs," advises Shane Aubel, co-founder of IT consulting firm Accent Global System Architects. "The more tangible, quantifiable results you offer, the more indispensable you will be. The business is the customer, and what the customer wants, the customer gets."
IT survivor tip No. 4: Work the numbers
Metrics are your friend. If you want to prove you're vital to the survival of your company, you better have the digits to back it up.
"IT people need to become experts at marketing themselves internally," says Sparxent's Taylor. "They need to provide more targeted and more detailed reports on where the IT dollars are spent; they need to put metrics in place to report on whether IT projects have generated ROI or not; and they need to be much more transparent in reporting on whether they've achieved the metrics or not."
In other words, be proactive. Don't wait for the CFO to call you on the carpet to explain where all the money went, says Taylor. Know down to the dollar how much it costs to provision applications or provide level-one support -- and then suggest ways you can reduce it.
"You need to be able to say, 'We just deployed Office 2007, and it took an average of 43 minutes to install on every users' desktop at a cost of $180 an hour, so it costs more to provision Office than it did to pay for the license,'" Taylor says. "When you have that kind of detail at your fingertips, the CFO realizes you're focused on getting the company what it needs at the lowest possible cost."
Tying your projects to company profits is essential, adds Finch. You want to work on the projects that bring in the most revenue or save the most money.
"Companies always want to cut failing projects and unprofitable customers first," he adds. "If you do have to cut people, you want to be able to do it with a scalpel and not a chainsaw."
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