Movin' on up: is your business limping along with outdated computers or a network that doesn't meet your needs anymore? Here are five ways to upgrade your technology and boost your company's productivity

Entrepreneur, Sept, 2003 by Mike Hogan

While Lotus SameTime won't eliminate your employees' use of public IM services, its user authentication, message-logging and auditing features breed accountability even when employees connect to their AIM buddies. Messages sent over the SameTime system, even to remote employees, are completely secured by 128-bit encryption. You can add an important customer or supplier to your in-house system just by mailing the client software and paying a $36 license fee.

Cheaper than long distance and offering more immediacy than phone or e-mail, messaging now occupies two hours of the typical knowledge worker's day and houses about 60 percent of all critical business information, says Osterman. The typical worker makes 10 phone calls and four trips down the hall to see co-workers every time the messaging system goes down for an hour.

IBM's own employees, who log about 10 messages per day, reduce telephone usage by more than 4 percent and save Big Blue about $13 per month per employee in travel expenses, says Kevin McClellan, IBM marketing manager.

What the numbers don't show, says McClellan, is the increased pace of collaboration that saves employees time, accelerates supply chain and customer service cycles and, ultimately, offers additional revenue opportunities.

IM is not without risks. But if you don't let your workers use it, fast-moving competitors could use it against you.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS?

Estimating your potential return on technology is a useful exercise that can help you refocus away from product specs and onto the real reason you're buying the stuff in the first place--to help your company make money.

But predicting ROI is hard to do. A lot depends on how and how well you use the equipment and what the billing rates of those users are. Here are some of the factors Dell system consultants use for network deployments. This sample ROI calculator (find it at www.entrepreneur.com/features/techinvestments) starts with total cost of ownership (TCO) and gets more speculative from there.

Since no one can foretell the future, product vendors can't definitively predict product ROI anymore than you know how many widgets you'll sell this quarter. But a vendor should, at least, be able to point you to research or anecdotal evidence upon which to base your ROI assumptions. If your salesperson can't, maybe your company is too sophisticated to be doing business with that company.

BUYER, BEWARE

By now, most corporate technology buyers appreciate that purchase price is Just the down payment on complex gear-like networks and phone systems. Significant after-sale costs are always involved in wringing productivity from high-tech equipment, sometimes making the total cost of operation orders of magnitude beyond your original cash outlay.

A check is seldom cut when these costs are incurred. They're paid in soft dollars hidden in budget catchalls like G&A or training, making total cost of ownership (TCO) difficult to pin down. Time is always an element--time spent on qualifying a product, deployment, training IT personnel and other employees. Worker productivity lost to downtime during a system changeover or system crashes looms large--as does the increase in IT management needed as a product's useful life ticks down.