"LISA is where I find direction for evolving the my core professional skills."
LISA '13 Attendee
"I use LISA to benchmark the SA activities in my company."
LISA '13 Attendee
"LISA is the place where industry best practices and cutting-edge research come together to advance system administration."
Nicole Forsgren Velasquez, Utah State University
"Information from LISA helps us push the envelope on automation and scaling, allowing a team of four to manage over 3000 Firefox build and test systems running 15 different operating systems."
Amy Rich, Manager of Release Engineering Operations at Mozilla
"LISA is the conference that I send my system administrators to so they can bring the latest tools and techniques back to the rest of the team. Much of our current environment can be traced directly back to LISA."
Cory Lueninghoener, Deputy Group Leader of Production High Performance Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory
"LISA is where professionals share what's hot in designing, building, and maintaining critical systems."
Tom Limoncelli, author, speaker, and system administrator
"LISA is the conference that I send my system administrators to so they can bring the latest tools and techniques back to the rest of the team. Much of our current environment can be traced directly back to LISA."
Cory Lueninghoener, Deputy Group Leader of Production High Performance Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory
"I keep coming back for the technical content and the personal networking opportunities. I attend for career development."
LISA '13 Attendee
"LISA is where professionals share what's hot in designing, building, and maintaining critical systems."
Tom Limoncelli, author, speaker, and system administrator
Winning the Budget Game: How to Get the Money You Need for IT Every Time
LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.
The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.
Getting the resources your team needs is a matter of knowing just enough about finances to communicate what you want, and explaining how it will benefit the company. The trick is to speak their language. Learn the basics of budgeting, benchmarking, resource allocation, cost-benefit analysis, and communicating costs using tools like net present value. Understand the importance of your business cycle and the difference between cap-ex and op-ex. The course will also cover spreadsheet magic, like pivot tables and pivot charts.
Who should attend:
Sysadmins who want to save their IT budgets, and need to learn how to speak “MBA”. This tutorial will help you do just that, arming you with the right approach and the right tools to go to management and communicate your needs and the alternatives available, so that you’re a part of the budget conversation instead of just the recipient of budget decisions.
Take back to work:
Understand differences between cap-ex and op-ex, and leverage differences in business cycles and settings.
Write a basic capital proposal, including relevant value analysis
Draft a budget, complete with impacts.
Compare alternatives and communicate relevant costs.
Fundamental understanding of pivot tables and pivot charts.
Topics include:
Capital expenses vs. operational expenses: knowing the difference, and knowing why the difference matters
Important business cycles and dates
Comparing alternatives and communicating relevant costs
Cost-benefit analysis
Budgeting, including drafting a budget, burn rates, and standard costs and variances
Capital planning, including net present value, PV index, internal rate of return, and payback period
