TCO

If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?

As the new year approaches, debates over the "value" of IT and business projects intensify; it's not holiday stress, but the excitement of the approaching New [fiscal] Year. Lately, I'm hearing more about the struggle to quantify business value, especially when selecting those few projects that will "make the cut". We will definitely iterate on our scoring framework, adding a cost / benefit template to facilitate more apples-to-apples comparisons between projects (yes, don't scoff  - it is possible - more…

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Five More Realities for Driving Business Value from Technology

Dennis McDonald's recent post listed Ten Realities of Managing and Using Technology to Generate Business Value. I think a few of these items need some elaboration ... Implementing a technology based solution without understanding the costs is a big mistake ... and most projects only consider TCI - Total Cost of Implementation. This typically includes acquisition, first-year maintenance, and professional services (or internal IT time) to integrate with existing systems. Smart managers will add in Recurring Costs, such as annual…

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Yet Another Discussion on IT Chargebacks

It felt anachronistic, getting into a surprisingly good conversation on the pros and cons of IT chargebacks this past week ... We're not seriously thinking about it (thank goodness), but a group of us did go through the intellectual exercise of discussing the good/bad/ugly of such an approach. Unfortunately, most of the "debate" focused on positive and negative experiences in the past. I think this is not an effective way to petition for such a change; it would be better…

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Free as in … the Open Source Refrain – Improved!

I'm not going to recount the history and foundations of open source software, just point out that the word "free" has long been a point of contention when folks talk about "free" software. For clarity, the open-source crowd will refer to ... Free (as in Speech), meaning the user's freedom to run, copy, distribute a piece of software Free (as in Beer), meaning the software is available at no cost BTW, the world is really into their free beer -…

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