What Are the Greatest Costs of Enterprise IT?

Enterprise IT involves a wide range of costs including hardware, personnel, and software tools. These costs allow your enterprise IT department to support the data needs of your business and utilize that data for meaningful insights. Generally, they work to:

• Find areas of your business that can utilize automation to improve efficiencies.
• Plan out where your business can benefit most from any technological changes.
• Provide support for any technology demands of your business.

So, not only does your enterprise IT ensure your business runs smoothly from a technology standpoint, but they also look for areas of your business that can be improved through technology. This makes the costs of enterprise IT seem higher than they should be, until you start to make cuts. The greatest of these costs almost always end up being personnel costs due to the huge responsibilities and expertise required to perform the tasks effectively.

Enterprise IT Personnel Costs

In order to create an effective enterprise IT department within your organization, you need to hire competent IT professionals. The salary for just the manager of an enterprise IT department averages at about $128,000 per year. Then you need to hire individuals who specialize in hardware, software, and networking. The salaries for these professionals can reach over $100,000 per year as well if you require expertise. So, to simply hire a manager and an expert in each area of enterprise IT, you can expect to be spending nearly $500,000 per year for their salaries alone. Once you add in all of their benefits as well, this number only grows.

The costs of personnel to staff an enterprise IT department shows why so many companies develop software tools to help automate the tasks they perform. Any savings in time for these professionals results in huge savings for your business as a whole. This brings us to our next largest cost, software.

Enterprise IT Software

Software tools for enterprise IT generally revolve around automating individual tasks in the software asset management process. These tools attempt to take out some of the labor in license management, software metering, software deployment, and patch management. Since most companies charge for these tools based on the value they provide instead of the cost to produce the tool, they can quickly become expensive.

The costs of these tools result in some organizations creating their own software specialized for their organization. However, this adds to the personnel costs of your organization as they need to first develop the software then scale and maintain it as your business grows.

One potential solution to this would be hiring a software development company to create specialized software for your organization. Most of these companies charge based on the project instead of a flat rate like the pre-developed solutions. However, a risk of hiring a bad software development company[1] does exist. If you take your time selecting a company to create personalized software to reduce your enterprise IT personnel costs, you can achieve exactly what you set out to in a fast-paced manner. This also keeps your turnover rate low by reducing the sudden need for additional staff to develop these solutions.