-  Scour the job ads and draw a line of best fit
-  Be best friends with a recruitment consultant (though take everything THEY say with a pinch of salt)
-  Hack into payroll/go through people’s bins

OK, so maybe not the last one…  Besides, online news sites are covering a new salary survey today which gives a national view of 2009 salaries from the board-level IT execs right through to managers, admins, analysts and engineers.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,39703954,00.htm

Among the interesting stats that get thrown up are the differences between CIOs (anything up to £100k) and helpdesk workers (around £25k).  Why the gap?  Surely it’s because CIOs are held accountable for identifying innovation opportunities for IT to increase the competitiveness and long-term development of the business/organisation.    Everybody in the IT department (and that often includes managers) meanwhile subsist on a diet of ‘coping’ with ongoing operations; averting disasters, responding to user requirements and occasionally getting to ‘add value’.

If ‘adding value’, ‘identifying innovation opportunities’ and ‘being strategic’ are keys to supporting the business (and of course getting paid more) then start Automating IT!  The more you automate operation, the more you can liberate innovation!

Pretty much any organization is going to have used IT to automate aspects of its business.  That’s the whole point.  The obvious ones would be the finance processes like invoicing, payroll and accounts payable; or supply chain logistics stuff where stock inventory is controlled and deliveries made as precise and ‘just in time’ as possible.  Less obvious ones would be the sales process, customer service practices and the like.  The point is that IT has successfully automated everything that businesses do; so much so that new Web 2.0 business models have since been created which are entirely based upon IT’s automating influence.

But – HELLO?! – can anyone else spot the glaring discrepancy here? IT has automated every other aspect of business life, except for the IT department. Surrounded by rack upon rack of the most sophisticated technology available, IT people are spending nearly 90% of their total budgets looking after it all; and the meager remainder on innovating new internal services.  If we’re honest, how much of that ‘operating’ pot gets consumed by administering time-consuming processes and replicated tasks, from silo’d and proprietary technology sets?

That’s what brings us to writing this blog and setting up this site.  Automated IT wants to promote best-practice approaches, and their attendant technology solutions, that do the following for the good of the IT dept:

-        Slash operating costs

-        Reduce man-hours

-        Cut space and power needs

-        Support better decision making

-        Boost uptime

Wish us luck!