Have you had more success with IT having its own company-designated budget, or being funded by the business?
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I wouldn't disagree with you. I look at it from two perspectives: If I went to a global VP or the head of a business unit and said, "I can make this happen faster, easier, etc. I need this amount of money to do that. And then I need you to network that across your peers at that level and get me the same from all of them," the response is always, "What's in it for me?" So you tell them something like, “I may be able to do something with that pet project you have in terms of priorities." <br><br>You can call that lip service in some respects, but I meant it, because I saw it from the perspective of enterprise architecture. That's how I always got my budgets approved. To me, ROI is a number that sits in a drawer after somebody says, "Okay, I'll give you a check." It's about the business value; the more value you can show, and the faster you can show it, the more buy-in you get. Then going back the second or third time is somewhat easier.
The culture of IT in an organization can be significantly impacted by whether the company designates a budget for IT, or the business has a part of its own budget designated for IT. And the latter is where the rubber hits the road, because if IT is not funded and has to go to the business, it creates the culture of collaboration. It builds a culture of funding, but it also allows IT operations (ITO) to become the innovators in that organization, because they have to plead for the money.
I've worked in organizations that do both, where IT is totally funded and IT is funded by the business. And I've come to the conclusion that you actually need a 50/50 model, because you need certain base costs to be part of the budget. Then the project-related side of things needs to be funded by the business, because that makes sure the business has the buy-in—they have skin in the game because it's their money that's being spent, as opposed to central money that’s seen as somebody else's budget. If I take my resources and play elsewhere, then it's somebody else's problem, it's not mine. But if you don't have some of the base costs centrally funded, then you run into many more problems, because you're trying to renew and improve infrastructure, etc. Having to fight with individual business units to try and get a portion of their funds to actually fund some of the infrastructure renewals—which are essential—can be really difficult, painful, and a waste of people's time.