RAPID ECONOMIC JUSTIFICATION(REJ)
"Truth and beauty of the numbers"
Nuts and Bolts: Like TEI, Microsoft's Rapid Economic Justification seeks to flesh out TCO by aligning IT expenditures with business priorities. The five-step process requires IT to: develop a business assessment road map identifying a project's key stakeholders, critical success factors and key performance indicators; work with stakeholders to identify how technology can influence success factors; perform a cost-benefit equation; profile potential risks representing probability and impact of each; and run standard financial metrics.
Brad Post, group marketing manager for Microsoft's business value group, swears REJ doesn't favour Microsoft products. "It's a church and state division. We're really after the truth and beauty of the numbers." To certify REJ as 100 per cent neutral, the Microsoft team sends its initial report to Gartner, Giga or KPMG for comment and authentication.
That touch appealed to Angelo Macchia, executive vice president and CIO at Aegis Communications Group. The Texas-based teleservices outsourcer, which has 10 call centres and some 8000 employees worldwide, was considering a move from Unix/Sun to an all-Microsoft platform. "Gartner did our audit, and they were tough on it," says Macchia. "They pushed back on comparisons that they thought weren't fair, and Microsoft went back and revamped some numbers."
Word of Mouth: REJ is best suited for managing single projects rather than an entire project portfolio. Analysts and users like REJ's business assessment phase, its TCO-like baseline and its inclusion of risk analysis, although that analysis is subjective. If the winds are blowing fair from Redmond, you could get the whole valuation for free, as Aegis did. However, despite the "rapid" in its name, the REJ process can be slow. Also, some organisations won't trust any vendor-sponsored findings.
Time and Money: Between 12 and 20 weeks; $20,000 to $80,000.
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