Archive for November 19th, 2009
Your Investment in Enterprise Software – Guidelines to CIOs and CFOs
The overall investment associated with implementing and maintaining a suite of enterprise software products could be significant. A 1:4 ratio between product investment and the corresponding investment over time in related services is not uncommon. In other words, an initial $2M in licensing a suite of enterprise software products might easily balloon to $10M in total life-cycle costs (initial investment in perpetual license plus the ongoing investment in associated services).
I offer the following rule-of-a-thumb guidelines to assessing whether the terms quoted by a vendor for an enterprise software suite of products are right:
- Standard maintenance costs: Insist on a 1:1 ratio between license and standard maintenance over a 5 year period. If standard maintenance costs over this period exceed the corresponding license costs, chances are: A) the vendor is quite greedy; or, B) the vendor’s software accrued a non-negligible amount of technical debt. Ask the vendor to quantify the technical debt in monetary terms. See Technical Debt on Your Balance Sheet for an example how to conduct such quantification.
- Premium customer support costs: Certain premium customer support services could be quite appropriate for your business parameters. However, various “premium services” could actually address deficits or defects in the enterprise software products you license. If the technical debt figure is high, the vendor you are considering might not be able to afford the software he has developed. Under such circumstances, “premium services” could simply be a vehicle the vendor uses to recoup his investment in software development.
- Professional services costs: Something is wrong if the costs of professional services exceed licensing cost. Either the suite of products you are considering is not a good fit for your business parameters or the initiative you are aspiring to implement through the software is overly ambitious.
To summarize, the grand total of license fees, customer support fees and professional services fees over a 5 year period should not be higher than 3X license fees. Something is out of balance if you are staring at a 4X or 5X ratio for the software you are considering.
One final point: please do not forget to add End-of-Life costs to the economic calculus. Successful enterprise software initiatives can be very sticky.
An Update on Agile Business Service Management
A previous post in this blog defined the demarcation line between The Agile Executive and BSM Review as follows:
If software development is your primary interest, you might find my forthcoming posts in BSM Review go a little beyond the traditional scope of software methods. If, however, you are interested in software delivery in entirety, you are likely to find good synergy between the topics I will address in BSM Review and those I will continue to bring up in The Agile Executive. Either way, I trust my posts and Cote’s will be of on-going interest to you.
Since writing these words, I realized how tricky it is to adhere to this differentiation. The difficulty lies in the “cord” between development and operations. Development needs to devise algorithms that take into account operational characteristics in IT. Operations needs to comprehend the limits of such algorithms in the context of the service level agreements and operational level agreements that had been negotiated with their customers (either external or internal). The mutual need is particularly strong in the web application/web operations domain where mutual understanding, collaborative work and joint commitment often need to transcend organizational lines.
Given the inherently close ties between development and operations, here are some BSM Review articles and posts that are likely to be of interest to readers of The Agile Executive:
- The Joys of Real Hardware – what it means to do Business Service Management on a very large-scale
- The Voice of the CIO – a study on the attributes needed by today’s CIO (yes, you had better be agile and Agile…)
- The Quest for a Maturity Model in Business Service Management – while the focus is on BSM, some of the models might apply in a fairly straightforward manner to Agile
- Business Service Management, Six Sigma and your IT Compliance Program – lessons to the champion who has one foot in Agile, the other foot in Six Sigma
- A Measured Approach to Cloud Computing – what it really means to “… make muck so you don’t have to”
- The Case for Agile Business Service Management – the fusion of modern software development methods with the prevailing preference to run IT from the perspective of the business customer
It is a little premature at this early stage to project how BSM Review will evolve. My hunch is that forthcoming articles in BSM Review on cloud computing, large-scale operations, leadership, risk mitigation and technology trends will be of particular interest to readers of this blog.
The Agile Executive 