New IT Director: How do you justify spending or proposals?
As the title suggests, I just started my first IT Director role (more functionally the CIO, but I digress) and I keep running into this same brick wall with leadership about spending money.
Basically, our IT department is a guy with his first IT Job out of college, and an "MSP" but the MSP is just a guy who does networking related work occasionally.
So outside that, all IT Support, IT Administration, Engineering, etc is all done by this IT Engineer. This is obviously not sustainable, there's a lot wrong with this setup, single point of failure, the fact that a lot of the work is much more experienced than the guy doing it, etc.
We are a company with multiple locations and a little over 400 employees. The company grew but the IT Department stagnated. Our prices are also bound by legislation and so there isn't really a way to increase funding to make things work so there's limited resources.
I explained all these risks and said that the IT Department didn't grow with the org, and that in order to get back up to speed with it, we'd have to spend some money to get there (hire additional employees with experience, software to automate and replace manual tasks, move away from vendors and own our tech stack, etc.) and they basically boiled it down to "we don't have the money, sorry!"
My problem with this whole thing is that IMO, what I'm asking for isn't some shiny new toy or something that makes the department just slightly better, I'd argue that due to the size of the company and all the work involved, these changes are necessary to run the department and do business.
I just don't know if I'm not explaining it right, or if there's maybe some "trick" to making executives understand that running an entire IT department off a fresh college grad is an awful design and will definitely implode on itself sooner if not later. But that's why I'm here.
Any tips? Ideas?