So Chris called me up, he’d been called in at short notice to discuss a problem an application team were having. It had become clear that the current server used for this overnight batch is not up to the job and is running low on capacity in disk, memory and CPU.

Anyway, Chris made the suggestion:

“Well the server is about 6 years old, upgrading it wouldn’t make sense, we could either virtualize it or order a replacement physical server.”

He was surprised when the reply was:

“There’s no budget. We’re not using vmware for this system.”

This is where Chris asked me:

“What does he mean no budget?”

“But we’re a bank? I explained, we’re only talking about £3500 with all the bits, surely there’s money somewhere? What’s the issue?

What you find in these situations is the following.  The application team/business line have not allocated funds (or choose not to make available) funds to buy a new server. Therefore there is no budget at this point in time.

So the meeting continues, and the application team ask what IT is going to do about it.

Chris replies:

“Well we can certainly see if we can improve the system configuration, but that’s about it, we might have some memory about, but not 4GB”. 

The manager then mentioned that unfortunately they can’t buy a replacement server for them.

What we’re being stopped by here is in theory “the budget”. In practice however, it is short term thinking, looking after MY own costs, MY budget as requested.  The rather trivial issue of willingness rather than ability to pay is the delay here.

In situations like these you might say IT should pick up the cost, keep everyone happy, but they are behaving exactly as an outsourced provider would. “You want an additional server, sure, its £3500, now how would you like to pay?”

Yes costs matter, but equally does delivery to the end user.