Learn How to Manage to an IT Lifecycle
In today's rapidly changing technology environment, it's crucial that you keep your organization's IT assets in the "sweet spot" between the bleeding-edge and technological obsolescence. For this reason, it's important that you manage your IT assets to their useful lifecycle. We've found that for most organizations, this target timetable is quite often 3 years or less.
There are two keys to an intelligent lifecycle strategy:
1) Get into a technology once it has become generally accepted and supply volumes are allowing pricing reductions
2) Get out of that same technology before support and maintenance costs make it too expensive and difficult to operate.
Forsythe's leasing experts can help you identify that unique financial and technological sweet spot for your organization, so you can lower your TCO and still get the technology your people need to maximize their productivity.
Reaching a consensus within your organization about these useful metrics requires communication across departments. It's important that you seek input from both finance and IT. This assessment should never be simply an accounting calculation handed down from the finance department.
The first step in the assessment process is tracking and managing your physical infrastructure. When working with our clients, we've found that there exists a 30% discrepancy between what our clients think they own versus what they actually do own.
It should be noted that not all IT assets are created equal (i.e., PCs vs. servers, servers vs. mainframe, tape silos vs. everything). You'll need to address these realities before you decide upon your useful life metrics. Quite often, we show clients exactly how they have underestimated the technology and TCO drivers affecting their IT assets.
[ Enlarge Chart ]
Over the past 34 years, we've proven to hundreds of clients why leasing their IT assets from an independent lessor can be such an effective tool for managing the lifecycle and risk of their IT infrastructure. If you would like guidance in determining your organization's optimal IT asset lifecycle, we invite you to contact a Forsythe leasing expert today.
