Improving SysAdmin communications with business leadership

Systems Administrators make up the backbone of any organization’s technical infrastructure. Considering their range of responsibilities for maintaining the stability and performance of servers, networks, databases, software platforms, security tools, cloud services, and endpoints, when they talk leaders should listen.

SysAdmins need the organizational and financial support of their business leaders to do their jobs but can often find they aren't always on the same page. For example, in a recent survey on trends in IT, members of the C-suite and IT professionals responded very differently to questions regarding their organization’s network. C-suite respondents were nearly four times more likely to report their organization makes daily network configuration changes compared to technicians, and were nearly twice as confident as IT technicians in the effectiveness of their network tools for supporting a remote or hybrid workforce. 

That’s why it is so important for SysAdmins to clearly communicate their valuable contributions to business leaders -- it fosters better alignment and also increases business productivity and workforce satisfaction.

SysAdmins provide the critical business link to align people with technology by managing complexity for users and maintaining uptime for back-end systems. These are the types of real business impacts that SysAdmins need to communicate to their executive leaders. All stakeholders should come to recognize the bottom-line business value of ensuring that IT systems, services, and hardware are running optimally 24/7, with as little downtime as possible.

Explaining the Business Value of IT in Financial Terms

In order for IT to be considered a strategic asset that enables growth of the larger business, SysAdmins need to learn how to build strong business use cases. SysAdmins can strengthen their relationships with the C-suite, the finance team, and the budget committee by translating what they do into dollars-and-cents decisions for decision-makers.

CIOs and IT teams should work to standardize their involvement throughout the business decision-making process, and not just as an afterthought. Prioritizing the early involvement of IT prevents problems such as needing network cabling after construction, or dealing with “plug-and-play” equipment that is incompatible with existing infrastructure.

To help make the business case, technical people should lean less on industry jargon and insider acronyms, and lean into business language such as NPV, EBITDA, ARR, gross margins, etc. You need to be able to clearly explain direct bottom-line budget impacts to the business, without resorting to fearmongering or exaggerations. Here are some essential use cases to help justify the financial value of IT.

●      Failure to properly install and upgrade operating systems, software applications, databases, and hardware components can lead to costly disruptions in business operations resulting from data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other vulnerabilities.

●      Failure to properly configure systems and ensure seamless integration between various platforms and services can cause network crashes and employee downtime.

●      Conducting IT infrastructure monitoring 24/7 and being on-call for incident response is crucial to ensure network security. Maintaining data protections with reliable backup solutions and testing is critical for data restoration.

●      Documenting IT procedures, asset inventories, and system architectures can provide finance, legal, and operational teams with a shared framework to ensure regulatory compliance and meet technical standards across the entire business.

Balancing Technical Skills with the Human Touch

Executive leaders often view IT as a cost center, overlooking SysAdmins and IT technicians as strategic team members. Yet business leaders who work to elevate SysAdmins as trusted advisors by prioritizing IT can strengthen the organizational bridges between IT teams and business operations.

Many SysAdmins built their careers learning technical skills, but may not have ever taken formal business or communications training. Most have an ability to simplify complex problems and develop logical technical solutions. Yet such hard technical skills should be balanced with softer people skills if they want to earn a seat at the leadership table.

SysAdmins can help improve their status by becoming more understanding of IT users who lack technical skills. That includes showing patience with users who become frustrated by network latency or bad Wi-Fi connections, or people who complain about the disruptive rollout of a new software platform.

SysAdmins also need to raise awareness about their critical responsibility to manage all business operations running on IT infrastructure. Most business applications require network connectivity, meaning that downtime or performance issues can cause significant harm. IT’s problems are even greater in this era of remote and hybrid work, with distributed users running business apps on personal devices outside of IT’s control. At the same time, leadership needs to adopt a more supportive stance to promote appreciation for SysAdmins and their important contributions to keep the business running and to keep the users happy.

Image Credit: Aleksei Gorodenkov / Dreamstime.com

Justin Ong is Director of Brand and Community, Auvik.