Ninety seconds with the CEO: turning an outage into a budget

It’s Monday morning. You’ve just waltzed into work, but instead of business as usual, you find your company’s website has been down for the past hour, making it an all-hands-on-deck type of day.

After several gruelling hours of troubleshooting, you restore the website. But instead of celebrating the feat, all you can think about is how you can use the opportunity to advocate for a larger IT budget to prevent future blips, especially if the blips in question resulted from a lack of investment in infrastructure or staffing.

Is now a good time? After the chaos of repairing infrastructure, you might be wondering if now is the right time to pop the budget question. But Ben Bernstein, manager of cybersecurity advisors at Huntress, told IT Brew that a disaster is often a prime time to reevaluate IT resources and spending with business leaders.

“I wish it wasn’t the case, but unfortunately, after a crisis is typically when folks are much more willing to break open the piggy bank,” Bernstein said.

Fernando Pereira, IT fellow at Serval, said that, before they make the big ask, IT pros should make sure the initial incident is fully contained and that they understand the root cause of the disaster: “You want to make sure you get it fixed first, and then as you’re going through that root cause analysis and understanding what’s going on, then you could lead into into a budget ask for your executive team.”

Getting down to the nitty-gritty. When it comes to making the big ask, Bernstein said IT pros should present information to C-suite leaders by leading with a “business-facing lens.” That means explaining elements such as how much downtime can cost a business.

“We always think about, ‘Well here’s all the technical reasons why we need money to have the logs and to store the things and to build these amazing redundant systems,’” Bernstein said. “But those words don’t really matter a whole lot to a CEO or a CFO, the folks who are ultimately holding the purse strings and making ultimate business decisions.”

IT leaders should demonstrate to executives that they are already leveraging existing resources to the best of their ability, and that this budget request is “truly something that’s needed on top of what you already have,” Pereira said.

Pereira added that budget requests should be proportionate to what’s actually needed from IT departments. “Don’t go in asking for crazy amounts,” he said. “You need to be able to really justify what you’re asking for.”

What to do if the boss says “no.” If all goes well, a budget increase should be in the cards. However, not everyone will be so lucky. Even in those circumstances, though, not all is lost: John Frank, founder and CEO at Third Road Management, a fractional financial services firm, told IT Brew that IT leaders can try to reemphasize the risks their business would face by not getting additional resources.

“The reality is, you need to spell out the risks of not making the decision very clear, and what impact it can ultimately have on an organization,” Frank said.

IT leaders can also use denied budget requests as a jumping off point for future budget conversations, Pereira said: “Any budget asks that I made during the year that did not get approved, I would always bring those back up as we were doing yearly planning because there tends to be a little bit more flexibility on establishing next year’s budget versus during that year.”