The Cost of FREE

Having a recent conversation with one of my customers prompted me to write this post. The conversation was primarily based around how IT would like to rationalize the number of systems, platforms and applications that needs to be supported in terms of lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). However in most cases since business has the final say in what IT does this becomes bit of a catch 22.

The latest work place trends across the world attribute to users being more savvy on what they want and have a common theme of, One world of business, always on, always connected and transparent. This requires software to simplify working together by allowing users to find information while managing content securely and providing the correct access to information.

In some organisations it is common that business users who are not entirely satisfied with the level of service that they receive from their IT departments (for some good reasons) would demand that IT provide them with applications that were more feature driven to meet a specific requirement. This either turned out to be that the business user would write a specification find a free “product/solution” with a short term objective and implement these and handover the support and maintenance to IT.

Basically this can be attributed to the lack of understanding of vision of the business objectives, lack of communications or quite simply bad politics between IT and business.

In the best scenario the business users should ask IT to provide with a solution to the requirements that would align with the organisations business objectives. This allows IT to source the best application that would be aligned with the organisations chosen platform which would meet the requirements of the business as well as meeting IT related objectives. The sad truth is that IT is always cornered as the “bad guys”. In the end if something goes wrong the blame usually falls in the IT court regardless of any other obvious factors that in actual fact would cause something to go shall we say “gotcha”.

In reality you would look at how much it would cost to a typical IT department to support one of these free applications? I always laugh when someone mentions free. Software quite simply is NOT free. You can shoot me yourself or hire a hit man. If you happen to make free software and want to change my opinion let me know. I’ll buy you a free coffee.

So it’s no surprise that IT would now need to up skill their own staff to learn and how to support the new application. But hold on there is more. what about the servers that these applications go on? What if they were running on say “Sunix” And IT had people who knew about Winux and not Sunix and Sunix was an platform that only a very few people in the world knew how to write code against. The free starts getting a bit blurred right about here.

So this means there is a cost associated with supporting the application and maintaining servers etc and this all adds up to TCO. Then there is also the fact that one day the business user who implemented the solution would leave the organisation. With that the organisation is left with an application that no one really knows how to use or worse case need to support and maintain. And what if this application was now crucial to the organisation? You could argue that this never happens. But reality is there are many organisations with this type of scenario who are struggling to rationalise their systems just because of silo applications which no one seems to know what to do.

It’s very easy as a business user to get excited about market hype, the web is pretty good for that and marketers who know how to manipulate user behaviours take very good advantage of this. I got asked by a client if their web site would be WEB 2.0 compliant. How would I answer that one? Who’s got the rule book for a Web 2.0 compliant site? I’d like to read it. When asked, “Why is it important to the business that the site should be 2.0 compliant?” the response was. “Isn’t new web sites supposed to be Web 2.0 compliant?” so another question. I could go on. Sadly this in turns shows that users easily get confused with business benefits and value vs. hype.

It is good for organisations to say “we want all our staff to collaborate on projects” but the first steps to providing the correct tools to achieve that needs to be thought out and planned. Organisations who are trying to rationalise their systems should look at their current capability first and then draw out a plan on what is easily achievable. It is one thing to say I want to be able to access my documents via the web. But if none of your infrastructure can support it then doing that as your first exercise is probably not the best plan. Most organisations that I know have problems allowing users basic email access outside of the organisation. So to move from such a scenario when IT is not even capable of providing external email connectivity to be able to being able to collaborate online in one giant leap is shall we say “ambitious”. There is nothing wrong in aiming for that but that is simply not possible if IT can’t support it.

Three questions that you may need to ask yourself is

My view is that business needs to provide the requirements and allow IT to choose the systems that would allow the organisation to achieve their business goals. Instead of meetings with IT to discuss specific requirements start to have conversations with IT on where the organisation currently stands in terms of providing a platform for business growth. Believe me IT wants to help but when organisations slash IT then they are left with nothing but sticks and wire. So blaming them IT is not going to help anyone.

So once again free is NOT actually free there is always a cost associated with whatever system you may choose, it’s the question of does this system lower the TCO in the long term and does it allow the organisation to be dynamic and provide a stable platform is the right question.