Note that the answers to these questions are only as good as the data you gather. If you have limited utilisation data, making a utilisation-initiated new hardware assessment will be difficult at best.
Decision pairs
Once you have answers to the questions raised by the initiating event, you can move on to calibrating the response based on at least a couple of the following pairs:
When we weigh a hardware purchase, we need to decide whether we're going to meet the immediate need plus one or two years of expected growth (a minimal response) or meet the immediate need plus three to five years of expected growth (a maximum response). Minimum responses generally cost less money up front, but must be revisited more often. Maximum responses require more money up front, but generally have fewer costs over time. For example, one manufacturer was faced with a reactive hardware request because the sales force wanted to install a new customer relationship system. The company ended up purchasing extremely expensive new laptops with an expected three-year lifespan, planning on moving them out of the sales force and to the mobile office staff in the third or forth year of service. The manufacturer might have responded minimally by leasing less powerful equipment, intending to return it after the lease expired.
Similarly, we must decide whether we're going to enact an incremental or a radical change. Incremental changes (like installing new memory) can cause unintended side effects while extending the useful life of existing equipment. Radical changes (like installing all new desktops) generally produce the desired result but have a much higher initial cost. For example, a training company once faced a reactively initiated training lab update. Their hardware could no longer sustain the new software they needed to train people on. Rather than buy all new hardware, they purchased new memory and video cards. Although this alleviated the immediate problem, it caused a host of other issues over time with the old training software. They might have responded more radically by completely replacing the hardware.
Finally, we have to ask whether we will follow a standardised configuration or customise one for a unique application. Executives and others with a large amount of budgetary control typically receive more custom designs than the standard worker, but occasionally unique configurations must be allowed in the interests of the business. For example, one local hardware store chain ended up installing a number of monitor lenses for individuals with impaired vision in response to several customer complaints.
The events listed above do not cover all of the possible events, but they demonstrate how a specific event generates a request for new hardware that then flows through competing decision criteria. Once the competing criteria balance, we can move on to making the case for the new hardware purchase.
