PC Refresh Planning

Background
In these tough economic times, eyes are firmly focused on the IT budget with businesses looking for every opportunity to save money. This article talks about the cost impact, options and issues around upgrading personal computers (PCs).

Planning
To plan for PC refresh, you need to be clear about your business needs and how critical your PCs are to running your operation.  Are you primarily using standard applications, server-based applications or web-enabled services? If so, you can probably afford to take a more flexible approach. If you are running intensive applications, integrating desktops into an enterprise IT environment or are highly dependent on PC performance, refresh is much more critical.

Once you have defined your business needs, you will be able to use your inventory of PCs and software to plan how and when to upgrade. The IT budget will take on the role of a constraint in the planning process. A longer term plan or strategy for your IT should inform your options for how the upgrade plan could span multiple financial years. This will be dependent of course on longer term business performance and future IT budget allocations. 

In practice, the upgrade plan is not just a simple case of swapping hardware. The plan will need to include the operating systems, applications, remote services accessed from each PC and any other special requirements. For example, you may be running Windows XP on existing PCs, but before you can decide whether to adopt Windows 7, you will need to look carefully at your applications and services to ensure there is full compatibility at every level. You will also need to check the terms and conditions of your software licences; upgrading may well incur additional costs.

Common issues
In the current climate of uncertainty and budget reductions, it is not easy to find a solution that is acceptable to both the business and the IT.  PC refresh should bring business benefit, but it can end up as a balance between risks and costs if elements of the refresh programme are deferred or postponed. If you previously purchased PCs with a 3 year manufacturer warranty and have decided to extend their life by 1 or 2 years, you need to think carefully through the implications. Will you:

• Continue to run PCs unsupported and leave things to chance? 
• Pay to extend the manufacturer warranty? 
• Arrange third party cover, perhaps using in-house staff or an outside support company?

A word of caution here - the additional costs incurred in keeping old PCs running is not money well spent and will most likely raise the total cost of ownership (TCO) you are trying to reduce.

Building blocks for the future
The PC refresh programme does raise some broader IT issues:

• Does your business have an IT strategy or medium/long term plan?
• Do you have a road map of what operating system, applications and services you need to support your business? 
• Is your IT budget sufficient to deliver the plan? 
• Do you have a complete and up-to-date database or list of all your hardware and software assets?
• How does your business intend to address the risks if you cannot sustain a PC refresh programme?

Summary
I hope this gives you a good feel for the key issues that need to be addressed. Like most things, a successful outcome is all down to good planning.

Please feel free to contact me or call 07966 158965 to discuss further.

Total cost of ownership

Total cost of ownership (TCO) is about analysing and managing costs. It can be applied in any context - for example, to a service, a system or a product, or even to owning and running your own car! Our interest here is how it could help to determine and manage IT costs within the business. The cost analysis is usually based on a service or system lifecycle and must include all running costs. TCO is a useful tool for comparing different options, solutions or scenarios and providing key information to help with decision making.

Determining the TCO for IT is often not straightforward. There are well defined direct IT costs associated with hardware, software, networks/communications, support, service contracts, etc. There are likely to be numerous other indirect costs, usually people related, such as IT training, additional support and other intangible things.For example, you might expect that deploying off-the-shelf standard applications will have a lower TCO than in-house developed applications.

There are further benefits - the TCO result allows some other valuable parameters to be derived:

• IT costs per user
• IT costs as a percentage of revenue
• Number of IT staff as a percentage of total users

These are independent of business size and can make useful comparators between different businesses or industry sectors. This is the basis of TCO benchmarking where averages are used to assess whether IT is cost efficient and is offering value for money. Depending on the nature of business, the IT costs as a percentage of revenue are typically within the range 2 - 10%.

TCO is applicable where a new service is being planned or procured; even a simple scenario may have numerous options that require detailed analysis and comparison of costs. For example, in exploring alternatives - whether to buy or lease servers or go with some form of hosted solution, or perhaps adopt cloud services.

In summary, TCO is a valuable tool for getting a better understanding of your IT costs whether you are reviewing existing services or scoping new services. Remember the aim is always the same - to save money!

If you would like to talk about TCO for your business, please do not hesitate to contact me or call 07966 158965.

Welcome

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Regards,
Barry