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Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »November 06, 2006 — CIO —
Remember the first time you picked up a cup of coffee and took a sip? It was probably unlike anything you ever tasted before. If you were committed to choking down the whole cup (perhaps to stay awake for a late-night study session) the first thing you probably did was dump a large amount of sugar or cream into that coffee to make it more palatable. Over time, as you became more accustomed to the taste of coffee, you no longer needed cream and sugar. This not only reduced the number of calories in that jolt of caffeine, but allowed you to appreciate the flavor of the beans, the quality of the roast and the subtle aroma.
That first cup of coffee can teach us a valuable lesson when it comes to managing the implementation of an enterprise application.
At first glance, a new enterprise application will seem strange to end-users within your company, and those end users will likely come to you with a laundry list of modifications, often designed to make the application more similar to what they have seen and experienced before. However, while the cream and sugar used to doctor up that first cup of coffee were almost free, modifying enterprise applications can add millions of dollars to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of that application.
Modifications increase TCO in three ways:
While they can cost millions, many modifications are like the cream and sugar in that after a while they become unnecessary as users become more familiar with the application. We all know there is no caffeine in cream or sugar – and similarly the modifications made to enterprise applications generally do not improve the ability of the software to meet real business needs!
Increased Cost, No Gain
If your company decides to implement an enterprise application, it is to achieve specific, rational goals. You may need to better coordinate projects and processes across departments, or streamline financial reporting and analysis. Or perhaps you want to allow closer collaboration with customers and suppliers, or to enable efficiencies that make your company more competitive. You choose the application and vendor that you feel will do the best job helping you reach your business goals.