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, and generally 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 to 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.

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:

Generally the best IT solutions are generated by establishing a strategic consensus of opinion within the client and then 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 solutions 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