5 If we invested 100k in “lights on” efficiencies, how much would we free up in dollars and resources?

Image from a fantastic article on tech debt: https://medium.com/the-andela-way/what-technical-debt-is-and-how-its-measured-ff41603005e3

Let’s imagine for a moment that, due to a variety of factors, it takes IT 12 hours to set up systems, access, computers, etc., for each new company employee. We onboard 5 new hires a week. Over the course of the year, that equals ~3000 hours — almost ~1000 hours more than the average employee works in a year.

Now envision then that we invest $46,000 in IT time, software tools, consulting, and engineering into automating this to less than 2 hours per employee for setup. We can save ~$125,000 in IT salaries and gain back more than 1 full year of an IT person’s time.

The math becomes, spend 46k to get a savings of 125k, which equals more than 1 full year of headcount to other IT work. Next, picture if we spent a little bit more to do the same with offboarding. Then imagine all that IT time being put to supporting revenue-generating and innovation projects. It starts to really pay off quickly, and a few projects like this can really move the needle. And that’s before we talk about the IT employee morale because, let’s face it — no one enjoys new user setup and rote, boring tasks…

With ~80% of IT budgets spent on KTLO, a little bit of investment into efficiency, innovation, and budget can rapidly make a large difference.

I like to think of tech debt as a tax (see question #2), but in this example, we see how tech investment can yield both dividends and innovation when done right.

So when you ask the question: If we invested 100k in “lights on” efficiencies, how much would we free up in dollars and resources? I guarantee savvy CIOs can easily answer this and proceed in a direction that can free up resources and further retain talent.

Follow-Up Questions:

• What other low-hanging fruit will enable us to go from KTLO to innovation?
• If you had KTLO down to 25%, what would the rest of your team’s time and budget be spent on?

Interested in reading the full series? Links below to 7 Questions Board Members Should Be Asking

#1: What are the ages and annual costs for our most critical systems?

#2 How much tech debt do we have, and how much is it costing us annually

#3 What’s the retention rate of our technical personnel?

#4 What does keeping the technical “lights on” cost us annually?