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Never purchase technology that is unplanned to enhance your marketshare and growth. Always have a well-planned budget and compare the budget to past trends that will justify Information Technology (IT). A well-planned budget will return value to businesses and minimize the risks. Planning for major projects and maintaining an accurate asset list will help justify your IT budget for 2009.

The second half of 2008 brought bad news for IT organizations and for most businesses worldwide. With our poor economiccrisis and the challenges of recovery in the year 2009, businesses have to cut on their spending and lower their budgets to survive. Replacing wide-area-network (WAN) links with virtual-private-network (VPN) will save thousands of dollars on monthly fees for midsize and large businesses. Chief Information Officers (CIO) have to:

Consider cost-cutting measures

Business model shifts

Restructuring changes

Other business strategies to justify the IT budget for production of business as needed to get through the recession in 2009.

Know your priorities with stakeholders to determine the right IT decision-making for your business is the key to establish a common vision or forecast. It is important to analyze business cost and how technology benefits objectives over time. Newer technologies can help facilitate changes, growth or improvements. However, know if the current technology is promoting business agility and efficiency while managing operational costs and risks. Preparing for what can or what will go wrong by controlling business spending. Research and communication with project managers will help justify business IT budget in 2009. A business will survive with a strong intellectual team by means of sharing information about projects. Shared information and knowing if newer technology will benefit the business and its future will improve budget estimates and value to a business as a whole.

Comparing your spending plans against your competitors will help evaluate a business budget in the intensity of technology use, spending and use of IT outsourcing. Benchmarking helps business understand the IT spending per employee and security. To justify ITbudget for 2009 is to:

Justify and plan IT staffing

Count your employees

Reduce or eliminate special bonuses

Reduce regional support do not over-staff

Data on IT staff ratios allows businesses not to over-staff allowing justification in budgetplanning. Outsourcing some services allows business to utilize personnel more cost-efficiently by hosting service for Web servers or email rather than buying hardware and hiring staff. It is important to know specific needs and do a cost efficiency analysis to decide if outsourcing is cost effective in short and long run terms. The ITspending in staffing and technology trend reports provide total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investments (ROI), such as, business intelligence applications, global positioning systems and data center consolidation. InformationalTechnology managers use IT Best Practices to:

Improve organization effectiveness

Understand competitors' best practices that include IT business strategy

Balanced scorecard

Infrastructure

Portfol io management

IT change control board

Some of the areas shown on an outsourcing report that evaluate alternative potentials on current trends are:

Application development

Maintenance

Disaster recovery

Desktop support

Database administration outsourcing

Understanding the overall ITmarketplace, products and services and what will drive people to your business along with what drives people away will help justify business IT budget for 2009.

Training is also important and needs to stay in the budget because it is necessary for IT employees to stay current on old and new technologies. Without proper training, mistakes can become very expensive and there can be a loss of critical data. There are self-study programs, onsite training and computer-base training to cut the cost of expensive offsite conferences that will justify an IT budget. Cross training and virtualization in today's environment may benefit a business and save power in the data center. Virtualization is the creation of a something without actually being something (virtual) version, such as, an operating system or network resources. Working on virtual teams reduces the overhead administration costs. Centralized and shared services help businesses reduce costs by benchmarking current costs and planning operations. This process will help determine who will stay and who will go.

Strengthen management and hire a qualified finance professional to evaluate the business analysts, process and account executives. Tips for justifying the IT budget for 2009:

Take control of unmanaged costs that you can measure and cut

Unmanaged costs that can be cut are data central power consumption and printing

Re-educate the business on service-levels agreements (SLAs)

Know what happens when SLAs are reduced by 5% to 10% before moving forward

A palmtop computer or PDA is a tool to help measure SLAs internally and externally. Hire a professional to source, benchmark, negotiate contracts and audit bills to cut costs in business infrastructure, operations networks and telecom. Telecom (TEM) services save businesses 10% to 35%. A complete and accurate inventory of a network in a business, cell phone, personal digital assistant (PDA) and laptop are just some services provided by TEM. Benefits of TEM:

Identifying weaknesses in security infrastructure

Predict future network costs

Pay bills on time

Validate invoices

Optimize existing network infrastructure

Convert one technology to another

Wireless services, location and onlineconferences also help justify a business IT budget for 2009. Videoconferencing can save big money over time. Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony saves 50% to 80% from the traditional use of public switchboard telephone network. Telephony services will not offer quality services as a direct telephone connection, but a service like Teleblend will save significant money on International telephone calling. Businesses can save 10% to 80% from using the Internet for business transport, such as, email & attachments, scans, efax and Skype services. Consider purchasing a new computer or laptop as a three-year-old PC and a two-year-old laptop may have maintenance costs. Businesses can also save money by exploiting commoditization. This theory is having the best for need, make better use of existing tools and improve process and policy by evaluating projects, storage reduction, consolidation and virtual servers.

Tips for justifying IT budget for 2009. Zero-basebudgeting is another technique of planning, decision-making and accomplishing goals that will justify an IT budget for 2009. Zero-based budgeting is a reverse technique from our traditional budgeting system. Each manager will justify complete details starting at a zero-base known as an active-balanced budgeting to help detect inflated budgets. Zero-base budgeting:

Increases communications

Increases coordination throughout the business environment

Helps managers find cost effective ways to improve operations while identifying and eliminating wasteful and obsolete operations

Useful to identify where output is difficult to identify

Identifying business services will increase motivation-enhancing responsibility in opportunities outsourcing

Budgeting process can make a difference for survival or failure

Society is in a recession, the economy has a financial crisis, but it is what businesses will do to cut back, where to spend will determine whether a business will survive and move forward. With advance technologies and procedures, planning for every dollar of income received will help a business in an economic crisis. A business will survive knowing where to cut back and where to adjust upward.

Learn more about this author, Lynne Conte.
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