Developing Evidence - Part II

In my last post, I wrote about the importance of developing evidence when demonstrating the existence (or lack thereof) of the issues your solution is meant to address. So now I'm going to take the quick list of issues I developed earlier and try to develop some evidence. Remember, we're looking for hard evidence but we may have to settle for something less. As I look back over my list, it seems like most of what I have here are results that we hope to achieve, not necessarily problems we expect to solve. I think that makes this tougher, but let's see.

• We would like to standardize Office versions across the organization.
  Presumed Evidence - It seems like standardizing Office versions across our entire enterprise would be a good thing. It should cut down on support and training issues as well as make our staff more productive. Personally, I use Office 2003 at home and on my work PC but, when I sit down at a computer here at work that is running Office 2007, I really struggle. I don't have any hard data on this one but I have heard others in the industry make these same points and I presume the same would apply for our organization.
• We would like the freedom and flexibility to move Office licenses among all our PCs.
  Hard Evidence - Because we currently purchase OEM Office, each version of Office must stay with the PC it was purchased with. Also, we can't perform automated Office deployments because each copy has to be registered separately.
• We would like to have downgrade rights so we can control when we roll-out new versions of Office.
  Hard Evidence - OEM versions of Office do not come with downgrade rights. In other words, we cannot install Office 2003 on a PC we purchased with OEM Office 2007.
• When we decide to upgrade software, we want the ability to upgrade all PCs at once, and not have to wait to go through the normal PC replacement cycle.
  Hard Evidence - Because we purchase Office with each PC, and only replace one-third of our PCs each year, we tend to have mixed environments.
• Tracking our software inventory and ensuring licensing compliance is a big hassle.
  Hard Evidence - Anyone who deals with software licensing will back me up on this one. Ensuring compliance takes a lot of effort and we spend a lot of our time dealing with licensing issues. This might prove difficult to quantify so maybe this wouldn't fall into the category of Hard Evidence because I don't know that we have any real data to support this.
• The access to the Microsoft eLearning suite of products would benefit all our organization, both inside and outside of IT.
  Presumed Evidence - It seems reasonable to expect that we could benefit by being better trained.
• Home Use Rights would save us money on licensing costs.
  Hard Evidence - For some staff in the organization, we currently purchase licenses for both their work PC and their company-owned PC (desktop or laptop) at home. With the Office EA, we would be able to purchase one license for both uses, saving us money.
• Microsoft provides training vouchers for 30-days of free training.
  Hard Evidence - There's a real cost for that training that can easily be quantified.
• Additional phone support incidences are included in an Office EA.
  Hard Evidence - Again, there's a real cost to those support incidences that can be quantified.
• The Microsoft Employee Purchase Program can be included as an added benefit to all our employees.
  Hard Evidence - The Employee Purchase Program is indeed included with the Enterprise Agreement. Quantifying that benefit could prove difficult.

Okay, that's it. If I did that right, there turned out to be a lot more hard evidence than I originally thought there might be. Also, working through it, I see how I could have just as easily turned some of those results into problems we want to solve but maybe I'm just one of those "glass half full" kinda guys? As I eluded to on some of those issues, even though I believe there is hard evidence associated with most of those, the trick is going to be actually getting to the impact those issues are having on our Credit Union. That's where we actually start to quantify the impact of each issue. I'll save that work for my next post. Until then...