How you can make IT integral to your funding proposal

Overlook information technology services in funding bids at your peril, advises Stephen Middlehurst, IT manager for the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University. Make friends with IT services before even contemplating a bid, he says.

I realise this may come as a shock but, believe it or not, most IT specialists really hate using the word “no”. Sadly, all too often we have to refuse a request simply because no one thought to talk to us in advance. We are, after all, in the business of providing a service and we can only do that well if we know what our customers want.

I’ve lost track of the amount of times that I’ve had requests for equipment or software that were impossible to fill in the time available. Or that wouldn’t work within the existing IT environment. Or that needed a chunk of time that we simply couldn’t schedule without a serious impact on other projects. Or, in one memorable case, a system we could have delivered but that would have worked for only nine days before it would have had to have been removed from the network as the particular operating system reached the end of its life and became a security risk.