Chris Bjorklund: You’re listening to the AllBusiness podcast. I’m Chris Bjorklund. If you’re getting this through iTunes and RSS feed or an online streaming-media player, you can hear interviews with other experts at AllBusiness.com.

Bjorklund: For some business owners, the economics of IT or information technology in their business is a mystery. To help demystify things, Heinan Landa, president of Optimal Networks says it’s helpful to put IT spending into two buckets: IT imperatives and IT investments.

Heinan Landa: You have your day-to-day in essence running on operational costs of IT and these are costs that they can also get a little bit sophisticated. You know, if you’re talking about an IT vendor like us or whether you’re looking at having internal IT folk that are providing support; you’re looking at your servers, your maintenance, your security, your backups, even down to the help desk for your users. All the things that are required to keep your system operating well and that’s really one bucket. The next bucket would be, at least in our lexicon would projects and those projects could range anywhere from upgrades; “Yes, let me upgrade my network” to strategic technology investments like “Yes let me put in a document management system, let me put in, if I’m an association, a membership management system, let me switch to sales-force automation systems and put one that’s more friendly to my sales force to see if I can’t get some better sales”. Those would be the projects that would literally lift your technology and give you, hopefully, a competitive advantage and those are the ones you really need to research because number one, that it’s usually extremely expensive and number two, take up a major learning curve internally. So those are the ones you really want to look at that ROI number. But I do have a little bit of a rule of thumb here on this. You need to have your core basic functions of technology working and solid and reliable before you start looking at investing on those upgrades and enhancements and technology investments, if you will.

Bjorklund: Heinan Landa is founder and president of Optimal Networks, an IT consulting firm for small and medium-sized businesses. I’m Chris Bjorklund, thanks for listening to this AllBusiness podcast.