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Professional I.T. Services | |
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Cost-Effective
IT: The Dark Side, by Richard Sonnier My company is in the business of making IT work for our customers, yet we are well aware that new technology is not always the best answer to a business problem. There is a trade off of flexibility versus cost, balanced also against the IT benefit. IT can be very flexible and adaptable. However, within a certain cost structure you can only get so much flexibility. Remember the typewriter? A typewriter is very limited compared to Microsoft Word. Word is better than a typewriter, right? Not necessarily. To use a typewriter requires only a little training and then practise. To use Word requires lots of training and equipment, and many users never use the full power of the software. If you only need to produce 3 letters a month, then Word with its PC and all the other parts required to use it is a very, very expensive way to produce those letters. Today, everyone buys the PC solution even though it costs more because they want flexiblity to do other things. We buy additional flexibilty but do we make sure we get the value for it? Let's look ay accounting. Should we buy QuickBooks at $1000 or an enterprise solution at $20,000? Why is the price so different? The answer is flexibility. QuickBooks is a great package for a small business but it is not as configurable as the enterprise solution. It will not be able to reflect all the details of your business whereas the enterprise package will have much more flexibility. However, there is a dark side. QuickBooks is relatively easy to use and training costs will be low. The implementation cost to get it up and running will be low as well. The $20,000 package might be better, but training will likely take weeks. Your staff willl be frustrated and complain. Implementation of the package may cost more than the software does. The simple, less flexible QuickBooks might have a total cost of $3000. The enterprise solution might cost closer to $50,000. Why would anyone spend all that extra money? Flexibility. If you really need it, the enterprise software can do a great deal more for your business and automate a lot of processing. Next week, I will take a break from the cost-effective IT theme and discuss some exciting developments in IT. |
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