3. Cost-Benefit analysis
To save repetition in this mini-web, the combination of 'upgrade / new system' will be reduced to just the word upgrade but the issues are equally valid for a completely new installation.
Regardless of whether you choose to use a formal methodology such as System Life Cycle, you still need to consider the benefits that an upgrade offers compared to the 'cost' of doing so.
This is called carrying out a cost-benefit analysis.
'Cost' was put in quotation marks because it is not simply a case of money. 'Cost' involves many other factors as well. These include
- Financial cost of the upgrade
- Loss of productive time whilst the upgrade is taking place
- Training requirements for the new upgrade
- Hardware issues related to the upgrade
- Backward compatibilty with existing IT systems
- Maintenance costs
- Support issues
- How to actually carry out the upgrade
- Staff required
- Staff skills required
- Timescale required
- Corporate network security issues
- Roll back and failure plan
As you can see, there are a large number of factors to be considered when planning an IT change.
Case example
This author worked for many years in a billion dollar car enterprise. They had highly sophisticated IT systems with teams of expert, full time staff dedicated to running their 30,000+ PCs connected over a world wide corporate network.
And yet, as of 2010, they still ran Internet Explorer 6 as the browser for all employees.
Why? They had plenty of cash to pay for new licences, so why keep a nearly 10 year old software application as the default web browser?
The reason, is that they carried out an annual cost-benefit analysis to see if it was worthwhile changing the software for every single PC in their network. And every year the answer was No - there was not enough benefit compared to the effort and risk to warrant an upgrade to the latest IE.
Often what forces the issue for world-level corporations is that the vendor declares they no longer intend to support the old software with security patches or bug fixes, and so the cost-benefit analysis eventually swings to 'Yes' - time to upgrade.
challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you
Click on this link: Carrying out a cost-benefit analysis