When ever there is an economic downturn, whether globally or in a single specific business, there is increased pressure to achieve greater value from one's IT organization. This is not only expected, but necessary and desirable. Every business today is, in part or whole, an information business. Successful application of IT is at a minimum instrumental in maintaining a competitive position in one's market, and at best a game changer that can catapult business to new levels of profitability.

However, as is far too often the case, all of us in and around the IT profession have our horror stories of companies that placed ever increasing and unrealistic targets on their IT organization in pursuit of getting more for less. Such situations often lead to IT staff working ever longer hours, with constantly increasing workloads, shrinking budgets, and ever shorter deadlines. Whether for fear of losing their jobs in a poor economy, company loyalty, or a host of other reasons, IT staff often shoulder such situations for a period of time, but then attrition grows and staff turn-over increases. IT skills are not interchangeable commodity items. The CICSO certified network engineer already in your organization has specific knowledge of your network, your people, your business, and your organization that another, newly-hired, CISCO certified network engineer will take time and expense learning to the same level as the one who just left.

As your organization faces such a "more for less" crunch, you as an IT leader need to build and communicate metrics that show both the value and risks of pushing the demands on IT too high. Here are some tips to help:

• Monitor Staff turn-over, ideally comparing them to a prior, more stable period in the company's recent past. Track not just number of employees departing per unit time, but capture their costs (salaries and benefits) vs. the cost of new hires to replace them. New hire costs should include some estimate of Human Resources costs (HR staff time, advertising and recruiting costs) as well as the new hire salary, benefits, and any hiring bonus. Consider including not just any initial training costs, but even an estimate of how much time existing staff spend getting the new hire up to speed.
• Build a profile of FTE allocation. If you have a support ticketing system and/or a project management system, use these to get a holistic view of where your staff is spending their time. Precise accuracy is not critical, but accounting for all major types of activities done by your organization is.
• As soon as you can, add to the above a forecast of work going forward, both for all projects currently in progress and any proposed new work. When a new project is proposed to start immediately, this provides you with data for a conversation on what work may be impacted. At the very least, it can initiate discussion on whether your peers and boss consider the data reasonable or accurate.

With even just these basics in place, you can start to construct meaningful conversations upwards, downwards, and across your organization. The goal of these conversations should be to align the work of your IT group to the highest priorities of the organization, to find efficiencies in your own IT group, and to limit the demands on your staff to what is reasonable and achievable.

Invariably, I hear from IT managers who run into peers, or even their own boss, who "refuse to even have the conversation." In general, such cases are not a refusal to engage in the conversation but a protest against the form and format of the conversation. A discussion on the balancing of work and resources with the value of IT has to be in terms understandable by the person you're talking to. Try to gain an understanding of what business context would be more meaningful for the person you're trying to have the conversation with. A VP of Sales may only be interested in understanding IT work in the context of the potential revenue to the company generated by the projects.

Lastly, if your management is truly unwilling or uninterested in facing the problem and having such conversations you should consider including yourself in the IT staff turn-over metric and seeking employment at a firm with fewer intelligence-challenged individuals.