What should we spend our end of financial year IT budget on?

Whether you have money left in your budget, have spent all the money in your budget or have no budget at all, the following will be sage advice for you.

If you’re not sure how to spend your money on IT, postpone spending and start writing a plan!

One of my key focuses in the SME sector is to get people aligning IT plans with business plans, so that the IT budget becomes a strategic-spend, aligned with the growth plans of the business, rather than a single line item on the expenses list.

So, what needs to be in the plan?

Your plan needs to accommodate you core business, so firstly consider which systems will be needed to support operations, finance, sales and marketing.

This will mean addressing the following questions:

• Are there any other parts of your business significant enough to either influence the choice or design of these applications or do they justify their own applications?
• How should the applications be contained?
• Are there cloud solutions to consider or do you need to build servers or buy hosted servers?

Careful analysis of these questions will help you to build a cost-effective budget, with some degree of certainty about how your money should be allocated.

As business has picked up during 2011, we are becoming familiar with the problems that arise when companies fail to plan. I have coined this scenario “Brand New Creaking Infrastructure”, to describe the emerging tendency to spend money on infrastructure as a reaction to an event or problem, disregarding the value of a comprehensive plan and appropriate resources.

Reactionary spending might mean a quick, new solution but fails to help solve the problem in the medium- to long-term, if at all. Of course, this leaves the management team and/or the company owners extremely frustrated, as they have spent the money but are not enjoying the anticipated benefits. This, in turn, drives a bad reputation for IT.

A good plan can radically and quickly change such a perception and ensure you are set up for success in one of the highest expense areas of any business, after payroll and rent.

So, what’s the best way to spend your IT dollar between now and the end of the year, or the first part of your new budget in July? Complete a review or audit using highly strategic advisors, and ensure you have the rest of your 2011/12 budget well protected from the huge range of mistakes that can be made in the information technology world.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.