5 Ways to Demonstrate ROI for Your IT Spending

What was your reaction when you looked at your last IT statement? If you’re like most business leaders, you squirmed at the high totals but may not have scrutinized the long columns itemizing server and application costs. After all, everyone knows IT is a necessary expense these days.

But how necessary are all of those IT expenses each month? Is there somewhere you can cut costs? Like most business processes, the answer to that is a resounding “yes!” but to do so, you’ll need relevant reports that offer clear visibility into your overall IT ROI. Here are five ways you can get that visibility by next month.  

1. Get Summarized Spending Reports

The first thing you need to determine ROI for your IT is a clear account of how much your various systems and maintenance programs are costing you. Sure, you can look at the rows and columns in that monthly IT statement for a full drilldown, but unless you’re a techie yourself, it’ll be hard to figure out how the costs come together. 

Get clear visibility: Get a summary of your spending costs broken down by preventative maintenance, support, software (including subscription fees), and equipment / virtual storage to see where the bulk of your spending lies.

2. Focus on Business Outcomes

After you understand how much you’re spending in each area, you’ll need to know how effective your efforts are. Accomplishment metrics help you determine the success of each of the spending areas you outlined in your summarized reports, such as the number of:

• Prevented malware attacks
• Resolved support tickets
• Problems solved

Get clear visibility: IT tracks a lot of metrics. It should be easy to access the pure metrics you need to tie direct costs to direct outcomes, so you can understand where your business IT is succeeding and also identify looming problems. 

3. Quantify Cost Avoidance

So far, you have the basic picture. Your summaries and outcomes link directly to your expenditures so you can do simple ROI calculations. However, great tech shouldn’t leave you constantly resolving issues, it should prevent you from having issues in the first place. Cost avoidance metrics help you tie your preventative measures to potential business savings using educated “What-If” disaster scenarios.

Get clear visibility: With clear metrics, you can determine potential cost savings. For example, when you find out how many systems were patched in a month, you can calculate how much money you potentially saved by avoiding downtime due to outdated software crashes, malicious attacks, or user error.

4. Use Dashboards & Exception Alerts

Good dashboards help you understand key performance indicators (KPIs) in a single glance so you can spot issues before they happen, stay proactive, and avoid downtime – even when you’re busy. However, you can’t watch a dashboard all day. By adding exception alerts to your timely dashboard reporting, you’ll stay up to date.

Get clear visibility: Natural disasters and malicious attacks can affect your business at any hour. By combining dashboards with exception alerts, you’ll have the power to avoid downtime resulting from slowly developing issues as well as immediate emergencies.

5. Understand Your Technology Trends

Long-term trend reporting clarifies the ongoing performance of your tech and offers an important big-picture view of how your company interacts with that tech. Trends reporting can help you strategize for better technology usage while giving you great ideas about where you can cut costs immediately and down the road.

Get clear visibility: In addition to uncovering surprising evidence about your tech usage, your trend reports may also indicate potential energy cost savings for outdated hardware or identify existing application redundancies.

It’s Time to Increase Financial Clarity for IT

Because the pace of technology changes so fast, business leaders often forget that IT is a business process like any other. Since IT is a business process, it should demonstrate a clear business case for you – with measurable achievement outcomes that demonstrate ROI. Once you understand the true effectiveness of your IT spending, you’ll have the power to strategize properly so you can increase your ROI through cutting costs, reallocating resources, and making appropriate tech investments.

Kaseya helps growing businesses plan strategically with easy-to-read, executive-level reports that quantify the achievement outcomes for your IT investments. We can also lower your IT costs by automating daily tasks that help keep your system secure and at peak efficiency. Contact Kaseya to learn more about how we can help you increase the ROI of your IT spending.

Dont forget to read our list of Four Difficult 2017 IT Budget Items and learn how to save big money and time later.