Cost-Effective IT, by Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show "Advisor" Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, Inc., provides weekly information on our show about business technology issues. He can be reached at 281-445-4800 x250 or rsonnier@nimbleservices.com.

Information Technology (IT) is an investment in your business, and like any investment, you should get a return on your investment dollar. IT can be a huge benefit to business processes or a giant sink hole for much needed capital. By avoiding the hype and focusing on the desired result, you can achieve the benefit. Before purchasing any IT or related services, you should consider the following:

1. What business process will be improved by the purchase?
2. How much money will you save or make with the inprovement?
3. What is the total cost in time and money to implement the new IT?
4. How long will this IT investment last?
5. What training will the company staff need to use the new IT?

Even relatively small IT purchases can detail large cost in implementation, training and ongoing operations. For example, a simple MS Office XP Professional upgrade that you can purchase for a few hundred dollars can cause problems with your other installed software and licensing. Once installed you may not be able to share documents with co-workers and business partners. Your PC may become unstable and be difficult to support. Often, printing becomes an issue. Typically, it takes a couple of months to work through all the problems and issues. When you add up all the cost over that two months including lost productivity, your upgrade has a total cost of thousands of dollars.

The bottom line is that the purchase of software is the small component of using it. When you consider the total cost runs into the thousands, then you can see the importance of determining the return on your software investments. The same principle applies to a new PC, wireless network, or PDA. The product's purchase does not reflect the total cost in terms of time and money. Our economy provides technology at an amazingly low entry price and prices seem to drop all the time, but to apply that "cheap" technology to your business requires detailed knowledge of the technology and a focused objective of what it can do for the business.

In the following weeks, I will explore this concept of cost-effective IT for business in greater detail showing how to use IT to lower cost and increase profits.