[xrp]

It professionals need to learn how to measure their impact on the company's bottom line. Right now, they can't give any sort of metric (either in cost avoidance or productivity gain) to the bean-counters.

Which is amazing, considering how many people in companies today use IT resources. RoI is simple for an IT pro to justify when he/she properly cites how important it is to have systems up 99.999% (the sacred "5 9s") of the time. A 1 day outage of a network because of an attack, power outage, system outage, router going down, whatever, can cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars when you factor in:

Delayed customer transactions
E-Commerce
Employee data entry and productivity (Essentially your employees come to work for a day, but can't work for a day. You pay them for sitting there).

Personally, I find it amazing that companies dump so much funding into new unimportant IT hardware (say those pretty $600+ 19" flatscreen monitors, when 19" CRT monitors @ $250 would do the same function for employees) and not the personnel to support the hardware/software and people.

[Poohbah]

Which is amazing, considering how many people in companies today use IT resources. RoI is simple for an IT pro to justify when he/she properly cites how important it is to have systems up 99.999% (the sacred "5 9s") of the time.

And that's the real problem: the IT shop can't quantify an answer to the question. They talk about how important five 9s is, but they can't SHOW how important it is.