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As budgets remain tight, data center managers often have to justify decisions that affect companies’ data centers to higher-ups. These C-level executives or others with control over large operations budgets frequently ask what others in the industry are doing before they approve the data center expenditure.

David Boston, president of Boston Consulting, says one of the best ways to answer that question is to conduct a survey of peers and present the budget gatekeepers with a report on the findings. This is about convincing senior management by showing what other companies in the same business are doing.

The purpose can be justifying something the data center manager is doing already or to convince them to approve a change to the data center infrastructure or to a process change, Boston says.

Boston will show exactly how to conduct such a survey and how to effectively present the results at the DatacenterDynamics conference in Atlanta this Thursday.

Scenarios where a peer survey can be useful can be whether a company needs to outsource data center capacity or leave it in house, whether to move some capacity to the Cloud, or whether to increase the frequency of on-going maintenance activities.

A convincing survey will include responses from anywhere between 10 and 25 companies, Boson says. Getting them to participate is a challenge, so the data center manager conducting the survey needs to provide a set of incentives.

“The largest [incentive] is to share a copy of the report when it’s completed,” Boston says. “Another method is to assure them that the results will be confidential.”

Another advice is not to send too many questions. “If you give them too many questions they tend to just ignore the request.”

Companies surveyed must be comparable to the company conducting the survey in terms of goals for data center operations, availability requirements, data center size, the type of operating platforms, etc.

Once peer responses are collected, the information has to be presented using metrics the person it is presented to can understand, Boston says.

While presenting a cost-benefit analysis of the planned change is useful, it is not always possible in the data center context, especially if the change is to a process. “The concept of continuous uptime makes it very difficult to quantify whether you’ll receive a payback for a change in the process,” Boston says.