The Politics of Costs

At some point in your directory service's life cycle, you may be asked to justify its costs, or you may need additional funding to accommodate growth or new applications. To communicate these needs effectively, you must explain costs clearly and make a convincing case for your needs.

When making your case, focus on the benefits that the directory can provide. Translate these benefits into cost savings for the organization, indicating how they represent a return on the company's investment in directory technology. For example, if the deployment of your directory and consolidation of LAN e-mail packages have allowed you to reduce the time spent managing electronic mail accounts from 20 to 2 hours a week, your organization is enjoying a concrete savings. There will no doubt be many of these types of cost savings. Collect them all in one document that clearly shows the total savings. In some cases the directory will pay for itself from the beginning. In other cases, it may be too early in the directory's life cycle for all costs to have been recovered, but you can calculate the date when they will be.

To make your case even stronger, be sure to include revenue that is both directly and indirectly generated because of the directory. For example, if the directory was leveraged to develop a new application that has spawned a new revenue stream, be sure to allocate a portion of that revenue to the directory itself.

Show how your directory service is being used and becoming popular among your users. You might maintain some type of usage data that shows the growth of your service; you can then present the data as evidence that the directory is providing a useful service. If these usage figures are increasing, they make an excellent case for additional funds to cover the cost of upgrading the service to provide additional capacity.

With the information provided in this chapter, you can make a case that you've deployed your directory service in the most cost-effective manner possible.