Sure, cool is fun, but let's not lose sight of the fact that having a stable, reliable technology environment leaves IT more time to create long-term strategies and perform technology evaluations. Vendors are usually open to providing demos, so there's no reason to stop looking at new technology, whether you have the budget to buy it or not.
DuPont e-business architect Gil Choi calls the debate about standardization versus best of breed "a loaded question." Most times it may be best to standardize, but if you're too strict about it you may not be able to find technologies within your preferred list that meet your business needs. He also says CORBA and XML interfaces between apps eventually will allow for the best of both worlds: best-of-breed software that functions predictably like one common system. This is the promise of Web services.
The State of Montana has a short list of standard vendors--Oracle for databases, IBM for servers, Dell for desktops. But it made an exception when it chose PeopleSoft to handle human resources, payroll and billing two years ago, and the shift proved costly. "It's been a good source of controversy" among IT staffers, says systems analyst and engineer Mike Hahm, who notes that the decision came from the top--another case where IT was not included at the start of a project but is now feeling the pain.
Despite economic uncertainty, many IT shops are forging ahead with infrastructure and enterprise application projects. Asked to rank their spending priorities for the next budget year on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents ranked infrastructure highest (44 percent gave it a 4 or 5), with business applications trailing slightly (43 percent). Security was also cited as a priority (42 percent). But don't expect new staff to help you with these projects: Spending on head count and consulting services ranked among the lowest priorities, with less than a quarter of respondents giving them a 4 or 5 rating. Of course, this disparity could be misleading because consulting and head count are funded out of operating budgets, while most IT projects are capital expenditures--one-shot deals with some long-term licensing and maintenance costs. Companies always want to decrease operating dollars, hence the reason bodies and training don't get funded.
Asked more specifically what their most important funded projects are, 34 percent said business applications, followed by storage and servers (15 percent), infrastructure (11 percent), network and systems management (10 percent) and security (9 percent). Asked to rank important projects that have no formal funding, business applications also led with 29 percent, followed by network and systems management (16 percent), security (12 percent), and storage and servers (11 percent). An effective tactic here is to look for opportunities to weave "unfunded" projects into funded ones. For example, with business applications, always make the case that support technologies--network/systems management, core infrastructure, security and storage--are critical to the successful rollout and upkeep of the application. The only way to make that case is to be involved when the project is getting the funding it needs--even though most companies plan for a 10 percent to 15 percent contingency on large-scale projects, consulting can swallow that in one gulp.
Davis of Rinehart Oil illustrates the difficulty of helping business applications evolve without funding. Rinehart's main accounting software runs on Unix, but everybody uses Windows on the desktop. The vendor of the accounting software will sell Davis translation software, but it's expensive and outside his budget. So he is forced to use a less elegant approach. "It's a matter of teaching people how to manually move data to and from Windows," he says. Ouch.
Davis' biggest budgeted project is to standardize desktops across the organization. PCs were bought piecemeal until recently. "When a workstation broke down, we went down to Staples and got the cheapest Compaq," he says. Shortsighted decisions were being made, and purchasers didn't consider the impact on consistency from the perspective of IT staff or even individual users.
It's a case study on why TCO is so important. Standardization is typically looked upon negatively, as something IT is dictating to the user community. Instead, Davis should build a case why cost of ownership, for both software and hardware, goes through the roof when every desktop is different. These are hard dollars that are easy to quantify. There's also a soft dollar cost around productivity decreases and potential critical data loss. All these facts should be in your arsenal so you can approach problems from a business perspective instead of a traditional technology perspective. That way, everyone wins.
David Joachim is Network Computing's editor/business technology. James Hutchinson is Network Computing's director/editorial content. Write to them at djoachim@nwc.com or jhutchinson@nwc.com.
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