Measuring the Benefits of an IT Hardware Refresh

All businesses, whether small or large, depend on strategy. Even not having a strategy is a strategy. Goals are an essential part of those strategies. To achieve goals, and therefore follow the strategy, businesses need and rely on processes. Many people scoff at processes and think of them as nothing more than bothersome “red tape” that gets in the way of doing their jobs. The reality, though, is that clearly defined and communicated processes help create order, reduce chaos and enable consistency, which means results can more easily be measured, checked and audited. Another part of the reality, on the other hand, is that some processes are convoluted, unnecessary and/or inefficient.

So, how does a business objectively determine if a process is necessary or unnecessary? Take the process of refreshing IT hardware as an example. Most companies seem to refresh (or replace) their hardware, including servers, desktops, laptops and workstations, every three to five years. Many IT types and hardware suppliers can reiterate the potential benefits of such a refresh strategy:  improved performance, increased efficiency, reduced support costs, reduced energy consumption, etc.  To truly know if strategies and processes have worthwhile benefits, companies need an objective way of regularly scrutinizing those strategies and the processes used to carry out those strategies.

With the proper planning and processes, many of the benefit claims can be proven or disproven. Let’s continue with the hardware refresh strategy example. Reduced energy consumption can easily be measured and verified if a company tracks energy usage properly. Comparing pre-refresh energy consumption to post-refresh consumption would be a good objective measure. Along the same lines, pre-refresh support costs can be compared to post-refresh support costs for another objective measure. These two measures will tell a company if refreshing hardware provides either or both of these two proclaimed benefits.

Not all benefits can be measured so easily unfortunately. On the surface, the claim of increased or improved efficiency seems more subjective and harder to verify. For intensive tasks, such as high performance computing or engineering design, benchmarks can be used to objectively measure and then prove or disprove the claimed boost in efficiency. However, for average business users, it would be harder to verify because many of their tasks are not very demanding even for three or four year old hardware. Since benchmarks and time tests are less useful for such tasks, determining the actual benefits of a hardware refresh from a user perspective like this, may require a different tactic, such as surveys. Surveying users before and after refreshing hardware can help create a more objective look at this benefit. It goes without saying that what you are really measuring in a survey is just perception, but at the end of the day, perception is all that matters to end users and can quite often become reality.

Ultimately, all business strategies and processes should be examined as objectively as possible on a regular, recurring basis. It’s not always a straightforward or easy thing to do, but it is a strategy that will improve any business in the long run.