Assure That Your IT Budget Provides for RAS
As the leader of the IT organization, it's up to the CIO to make sure that the budget has ample production support services to attain RAS. Many application promotions become disasters because they are created without regard for budget costs and the additional overhead for production services.
Many costs are incremental and are, therefore, not full costs. They must be budgeted as full costs. For example, the addition of an application to the production portfolio may only add a workload equal to a half-time equivalent persons in the database administration support group. Unfortunately, unless the organization has an arrangement with a part-time DBA service provider, the cost of support will grow to one FTE or the existing staff will be faced with the added burden without increased personnel. In some cases this may be handled for a budget cycle with overtime dollars, but it is not recommended.
The CIO must oversee the budget cycle or delegate this responsibility to someone in the organization. Either way, you want to make sure that the budget checklist includes:
Database administration (user database management, DBMS administration, monitoring, and performance tuning).
Server administration (operating system administration, monitoring and performance tuning).
Network administration (network administration, monitoring and performance tuning).
Data center operations (backups, recovery, monitoring, and disk management).
Personnel costs related to database administration, server administration, network administration, and data center operations.
Hardware, software licensee and upgrade costs. These items may be required for development, QA, and production systems.
Supplies such as paper, disks, tapes, manuals, and printing costs.
Training costs, especially flexibility in calendar assignments so that staff can attend classes.
Help-desk support.
Additional or upgraded license fees to support new or enlarged applications.
Maintenance contracts from hardware and software vendors.
Facilities and utilities.