What is Budgetcentricity?
Despite myths and expressions to the contrary, a diet is about what you eat, not what you don't eat. The same can be said for budgeting on a personal level and especially on a business level.
When it comes to spending money, being budget conscious or being on a budget doesn't refer to what you don't buy or can't afford to buy but what you can buy within your means and based on your needs.
In the realm of IT and business procurement, what you don't buy is only important if what you bought doesn't meet the requirements and needs of your business or client service deployment initiatives.
Enter the "budgetcentric" IT professional, who tends to emphasize the immediate needs in operational expenditure rather than the intangible and more uncertain theory-driven capital expenditures.
This "budgentcentric" IT professional, consultant and Managed Service Provider (MSP) is more concerned with spending money wisely than not spending money on technology infrastructure at all and saving for unforeseen downturns or recessionary double dips.
Simply put, budgetcentricity embodied in an IT planning and procurement specialist -- in the wake of a recession – shows up when an IT pro realizes there's a stark contrast between being thrifty and being and being miserly when it comes to investing and reinvesting in IT infrastructure and computer processing environments.
Incorporating this realization into IT resource strategy and planning at both the service and procurement level is puts this philosophy into action.
The key to being "budgetcentric" is not making cutbacks based on reactionary measures and trepidation due to the broader marketplace, but making smarter purchasing decisions that not only stretch the dollar further but build on strengths of a particular processing environment.
In order to understand this approach to IT spending from both a managed service provider and small and medium sized business (SMB) industry client, all IT resource strategy and procurement planners need to know the difference between capital expenditures and operational expenditures (this will be further expounded upon in the IT spending trends section) as well as the overall economic climate. Only then can stakeholders make informed decision.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on August 18, 2010