One of the most exciting — and at the same time, most frustrating —
things about information technology is the rapidity with which changes occur and new hardware and software products emerge, with fantastic new "must have" features that make it easier for you and your employees to do your jobs.There are two extreme approaches to upgrading — some companies, especially those in the tech industry themselves, desire to be on the cutting edge and always have the latest and greatest. These early adopters toss out their old systems and replace them with the new as soon as it's available. Other companies, especially those in more "traditional" or conservative fields, go by the "if it's not broke, don't fix it" philosophy. They tend to hang onto their old tried and true technologies and upgrade only when forced to do so because a new feature set is absolutely required to get the job done or, more often, because the old machines finally break down and the currently available replacements don't support the old software.
These two strategies have something in common: they aren't really strategies at all. They're both reactive — the first driven by reaction to the marketing of new products and the second driven by reaction to necessity. The smarter course is to develop a plan and timeline for upgrading, taking many factors into consideration — including scalability. A long-term plan must take into account future growth and changes anticipated by your company and the way those changes will affect your upgrade needs.
Categorise and prioritise
The first step in putting together your upgrade plan is to categorise
and prioritise potential upgrades. Some categories of upgrade items
include client computer systems; peripherals (monitors, scanners,
printers); client software; server hardware; server software; security
devices (firewalls, biometric and smart card readers, IDS appliances);
network devices (routers, switches, network printers) and network
infrastructure (cabling, Internet connection).
Of course, you don't have to upgrade all of the items in a particular category at the same time. For example, you might plan to upgrade the client computers in a particular department, such as the graphics department, based on those users' greater need for the features of new operating systems and applications. Or you might upgrade only certain servers, such as your mail servers, to take advantage of a new release of the mail server software that will make it easier to support your mobile users.
Thus you may want to create subcategories, such as "client computers — accounting department", "client computers — graphics department", "client computers — upper management" and so forth. Similarly, software is a very broad category and you may upgrade operating systems and/or specific applications while continuing to use older versions of other applications.
Set priorities
Once you've identified the categories and subcategories, you can
prioritise them based on the cost/benefits ratio of upgrading a
particular category or subcategory. What items are serving as the
bottlenecks that keep work from getting done as efficiently as it could
with newer equipment and/or software? For example, if you're losing
business...
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