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TCO-ROI Review
Increasingly there is more
pressure on IT departments to deliver tangible value to the business
and yet there seems to be a significant gap between the business and
IT functions. All too often the business function engages the IT
supplier community and periodically implements a tactical solution
for a strategic challenge, generating tangible IT support issues,
with associated medium to long-term TCO and ROI issues.
As individuals or a team, Value-4IT personnel provide a balance of
business and technical acumen that can bring a dispassionate but
relevant viewpoint for reviewing IT solutions, whether before
implementation or several years into their lifespan, although
ideally such reviews should take place during the selection process.
Ultimately it's sometimes easier for an independent third party to
influence, educate and mentor the various client functions to find
the best solution for their business requirements, as opposed to
being guided by the solution supplier, generally an ISV, IHV or
Value-Added Reseller (VAR).
IT solutions don't have to be about compromise, but they should be
about a meeting of minds from the business and IT functions within
the client's business. Equally in today's information driven world,
some businesses might deploy the same hardware, the same software
and sometimes even the same application packages, but the one thing
that differentiates one business from another is data. It therefore
follows that a competitive edge could be derived by maximizing data
value, but this can only be possible by considering each and every
scenario, including but not limited to:
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Disaster Recovery (Data
availability to meet RTO and RPO SLA criteria) |
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Regulatory
Compliance (Data storage and retrieval for SOX, HIPAA, DPA,
et al) |
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Security
Compliance (Data security via ISO 17799, BS 7799, PCI, et
al) |
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Service Management (General
processes via ITIL, ITSM, BS15000, et al) |
Generally the best IT solutions
are generated by establishing a strategic consensus of opinion
within the customer team and then by engaging the IT supplier
community via RFI, RFP, ITN and ITT type activities, while using
Balanced Scorecard and Function Comparison Matrices to evaluate
suppliers' accordingly. Then a structured review of bottom-line
solution costs is timely, generally measured by ROI, TCA and TCO
methodologies, and such reviews might then and only then
generate the need for pragmatic compromise due to cost versus
value considerations...
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Failing to prepare is preparing to fail! |
There are risks
and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the
long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F.
Kennedy |
