Having leftover IT budget from the previous year or quarter can be a luxury. It’s also a challenge in how to best apply it in ways that are smart investments delivering long-term digital transformation returns. Global IT spending is projected at USD $4.5 Trillion for 2022, according to Statista. This big number obscures the reality that even as many individual IT budgets may increase, ROI is more vital than ever.

Scalable IT investments are a big priority for delivering important dividends in operational process and automation flexibility today and tomorrow. The goal is to find ways to use those leftover dollars that bring both immediate and long-term returns for every IT organization. Here are three important ways to deliver on all counts.

#1. Seek Investments that Offer Flexibility, Scalability, and Cost Savings

IT priorities change all the time — especially around the end/beginning of the year as you define larger, long-term initiatives. Legacy system and application mapping can be a good place to begin planning how to make them compatible with digital transformation initiatives. This helps you determine if on-prem and VMs or containers in the cloud bring the most benefit and set the stage for the transition to cloud native applications with microservices and containers.

Then there are opportunities to move from an on-prem application, which is costly in terms of maintenance, updates, and licensing along with usability and scalability limitations. Equally important are the IT personnel costs for maintaining them when these team members could be working on more important projects. One answer may be looking at making the switch to a SaaS solution where the shift can bring pros like:

• Easier maintenance
• More cost efficient and flexible licensing
• Automatic updates, better security, and access management
• Greater scalability and more

You’ll have to weigh any cons that might apply to your business operations or cost structures, but there are bound to be applications, workloads, and databases.

Applications are the foundation of internal processes and external services and customer experiences for most businesses, so it’s always a great idea to invest leftover budget into developing DevOps practices. A Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline will make all future application updates and delivery faster and more efficient. It also positions you for the flexibility of working with architecture as code. That goes directly to your ability to foster DevOps collaboration and faster feedback loops for new and improved:

• Services
• End user/customer experiences
• Innovation and even new lines of business

This type of forward thinking paves the way for projects focused on specific business outcomes in 2022 and beyond, so it’s a savvy investment.

#2. Balance Innovation with Business Process Improvements

This leftover budget investment approach is a continuation of the above investment idea. Leftover budget can enable you to strengthen evergreen IT management, which is always a long-term plus. But you must balance it by developing a foundation for innovative business outcomes that strengthen the business’ ability to compete.

Finding approaches to solving technical debt in ways that avoid the major cost increases of rip and replace can also drive your use of leftover IT budget. This can be a major way to advance digital transformation that balances innovation and business process improvement. It can also be a great way to unleash trapped value in existing infrastructure with platform improvements like automation.

It’s not just about identifying and quantifying the cost and time savings from automating the maintenance of systems of record and other employee tasks. It’s also about automating processes that set you up for digital transformation in terms of AI, cloud, and IoT, among others.

Upcoming business initiatives in 2022 and beyond will probably involve AI, Cloud, or new product development, which means changing some business processes. It’s an excellent investment of that leftover IT budget to conduct a complete current state business process analysis, which would include application mapping.

This helps you identify improvement areas and map out a path to realize a better future through automation. It’s also money well spent for setting the foundation for cloud, AI, and IoT initiatives.

Most CTOs see a problem in finding the internal IT personnel with the time, skills, and expertise to explore these possibilities. but our third way to spend leftover IT budget eliminates the problem while providing a means to making each quarter’s budget go further to present business outcome benefit realization.

#3. Develop a fractional support network for incremental projects via IT Consulting

Even the largest enterprise IT organizations struggle with having the personnel with the right skills and time to assign to new projects and initiatives that further the business. Seventy-Six percent of IT decision-makers are experiencing critical skills gaps on their teams, according to the Skillsoft 2021 IT skills and Salary Report.

This doesn’t change the fact that these initiatives still need to get started to keep the business competitive, innovating, and delivering better services and products. Leftover IT budgets can be useful in moving towards this goal by supporting the costs of a digital transformation consulting team.

A partner like Techolution specializes in providing full or fractional support via additional IT team members or IT specialists in Cloud, AppDev, AI, and IoT for example. By collaborating and working as a member of your IT team, you can cost-effectively build the project foundation or complete larger initiatives. Having IT support available that understands your business, IT team, and project goals when you need them can also support internal IT team training.

Techolution’s collaborative and learning environment approach means your IT team members are involved every step of the way. This approach bakes in knowledge sharing and skill update support by the Techolution team. Your IT team will gain the skills to manage and grow those new implementations over time and position them for future certifications if so desired.

By investing in your IT team and projects through a fractional support model, you can provide the continuous learning that makes personnel want to stay. It also gives them loyalty incentives through long-term planning and implementation of new project in areas like:

• Cloud management
• Automation
• AI
• IoT
• DevOps
• GitOps

These become exciting and new opportunities for IT personnel while also supporting the realization of specific business outcomes. The planned business outcomes can include operational, brand, services and bottom/top-line growth, along with competitive positioning.

Getting ROI from IT budget Leftover Investment

It’s just as critical to measure the ROI of your leftover IT budget as it is most of your IT budget. The challenge is that there are so many variables to determining true ROI with IT investments. Savvy spending of leftover IT budgets can build the necessary strategy for deciphering complex ROI through steps like:

1. Identifying the business problem or opportunity that aligns with business outcomes, business model and market conditions
2. Defining business outcomes such as increasing revenue, decreasing costs, improve customer experience, adding new services or improving employee productivity
3. Developing clear and detailed investment metrics across technologies and services, that include:

• • Network infrastructure
  • Applications
  • Management and monitoring tools
  • Security
  • Project staffing
  • End-user training
  • Consulting
  • Identifying metrics and KPIs showing ROI on budgeted investment
  • Determining realistic time frames

ROI is more than cost savings, increased revenue, new services, innovation operational efficiencies or greater market share. It’s understanding the value of long-term skill improvements and development of a culture of digital transformation. It’s vital to have clear business goals and what the investment address and/or problems it will solve. This makes it easier to reverse engineer the process to determine ROI.

Having the support of a digital transformation partner like Techolution can help to determine the most effective use of the leftover IT budget and how that can support your yearly or quarterly budget initiatives. To learn how Techolution can partner with you in realizing ROI business outcomes through digital transformation, visit our Services Page.