By Nancy Cox  Building a Corporate Testing Lab Funding the Lab The proper level of funding will let you build a gleaming, bustling showcase for emerging technology. Getting only part of what you need will ensure that your test lab withers in a cramped, dimly lit, windowless room somewhere in the bowels of the headquarters building. You will need an executive champion or sponsor to get corporate buy-in for funding the lab and for ongoing support. This person should be a good marketer and know what the lab will contain, what will be tested and delivered and what the added value to the corporation will be. The higher up the food chain this person is, the better. The sponsor should be willing to follow the progress of the lab from conception through to day-to-day operation, providing executive insight and support for additional capital expenditures when required and promoting the lab's services to other executives and even to customers. Where should you turn to secure funding for the corporate test lab? One likely place is, of course, the traditional overhead budget. Every department will or should benefit from the testing that is performed in the lab and from the accumulation of expertise in new and emerging technologies housed there. But you'll be in a yearly competition with all the other divisions vying for corporate resources. Another place to find funds is in support of a major program or project for which the lab can perform targeted testing. Then all the hardware and software purchased for that specific project can be redeployed to the lab for more general testing needs. For example, if the corporation wants to implement electronic software-distribution capabilities for the entire enterprise, funds should be set aside in this budget to procure the requisite hardware and software needed to test and deploy this service. Also, you may want to link up with the training and education department so that employees can use the lab to educate themselves on the latest technology within their particular area of interest. Training generally has hardware, software and space allocated for their purposes and piggy-backing on this may be a good interim step. The funding to implement a full-blown test lab requires a cost-benefit analysis that includes both tangible and intangible costs. You first will need to specify all the capital equipment and software that will be needed at start-up. You'll also need to have an expense budget to be used on last minute items such as cables and connectors and operating funds for ongoing expenses such as for office supplies, disks, software upgrades, maintenance and any overhead items such as floor space and power. Offsetting these costs will be the potential savings or revenue in a typical return on investment calculation. Savings would come from the reduction in time and labor to evaluate and deploy upgrades and revenue would come as a result of charging users back to use the services of the lab. Of course, you can always pitch the lab as a sunk cost, citing the intangible benefits of having new technology on site and keeping the expertise of employees within the company instead of outsourcing it. Selecting Lab Personnel It's difficult to get good help these days, and finding qualified personnel for a corporate test lab is no exception. You'll need people with highly developed expertise in most of your company's standard products, with a sense of curiosity and a willingness to immerse themselves in new technology. Expertise in the prevalent operating system and computing platform as well as the Internet and several office type applications, such as e-mail, spreadsheets and databases, is beneficial. Working in the lab can be billed as a dream job--you get to play with all the latest toys, conduct market research and attend industry trade shows. It can also be a stepping stone to project management because managing large-scale evaluations involves leading teams in scattered locations working toward a common goal of recommending the best hardware or software for the entire enterprise. You'll need at least one full-time person to start. As the workload increases, and it will, you'll need either another full-time employee or part-time people for the big evaluations, such as selecting a new standard desktop. Also, a lab technician, even a part-time one, who will set up the tests, keep installed releases current (latest OS release and patches, service packs, selected messaging applications and Web browsers) and keep the lab itself neat and tidy, is a good investment. Bear in mind that you are providing a service to the corporation. One of the most important qualities in lab personnel is a good customer service demeanor and the ability to work well with all types of users from expert to novice, from boardroom to boiler room. The lab employees should also be able to gather requirements from end users, perform detail ed product testing and report the results in a succinct and informative way. Print This Page E-mail this URL