The Total Cost of Ownership Issue
Why should we be concerned with complexity? There are many reasons, but the overriding one has to do with the cost of ownership. If we can't control dependencies, we can't manage the IT infrastructure, set realistic budgets, allocate resources, justify expenditures, control costs, and ultimately guarantee reasonable return on investment. We can't balance value and cost. That is, we can't ensure that the IT infrastructure is aligned with the business objectives and control the total cost of ownership.
Upcoming articles discuss the total cost of ownership in more detail and begin to describe our "assess, build, and operate" approach to balance value and costminimizing the cost of ownership while maximizing value to the business.