I mentioned last week that it is probably about time to shake off the shock of the downturn and start looking seriously at how to restructure your IT department to deal with tighter, more competetive markets. I'll put up a series of posts this week on that topic (possibly fading into the following week as well, I'm a little tight on time right now myself), beginning today with a post on the subject of developing and exposing IT metrics to the rest of the business in order to bring them on board with IT spending initiatives. Later in the week I'll offer some of my decidedly unscientific ideas on procurement and support, lightweight, flexible operations models, and outsourcing and offshoring options.

It's always interesting to me how businesses can suddenly find so much to cut when they are threatened by financial conditions, and I often wonder why it is that they aren't operating at that peak of efficiency even when times are good. What do all these companies have against greater profits? I suspect that the answer is that financial difficulties present political options which would otherwise be unpalatable in the organizations. If it's disappointing to realize to what extent this sort of factor can cripple your daily business operations (and I suspect it's more disappointing to the largely rational and fact-oriented IT crowd than many others) the good news is, you can take advantage of the same conditions to rebuild your department into a more competetive and stronger organization than ever. There is no magic bullet to achieve this, but one important pre-condition is that you are able to recognize the opportunity to do so when it presents itself. That, more than any specific technique or recommendation, may be the most important thing to take away from these posts.