Identifying Business Needs

Identifying business needs is a topic of such scope that it can seem overwhelming. A good place to start is with individual departments or areas. For example, consider the needs of your sales, human resources, and marketing departments. What does each area need to do now, and what services will be of benefit in the future?

Consider basic operations (such as accounts payable and inventory) that have to be taken care of daily, as well as less frequent operations (the launching of a new product). What kinds of flexibility need to be built into the IT systems? What sorts of changes must be anticipated to deal with increased Internet activity or increased access for users in remote locations?

The research you perform into the organization's business requirements can also help you overcome resistance—and there's always some resistance—to changes in the infrastructure. As people participate in your research and share your understanding of the organization's current issues and opportunities, more of them will come to have a personal stake in supporting your Windows 2000 deployment.

Getting Specific

Start with a list, ranked in order of importance, of enterprise functions that are necessary to meet your organization's business goals. As part of that list, incorporate the following:

• A total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis identifying potential areas where upgrades to the IT infrastructure can result in cost reductions
• A return on investment (ROI) analysis identifying the financial opportunities that can result from upgrades to the IT infrastructure
• Additional business that can result from the infrastructure upgrade
• Potential risks from not updating the IT infrastructure

Information on using the Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) framework to analyze and optimize IT investments can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/business/solutions/value/valuehome.asp.

These are complicated issues with much overlap, so you might have to construct this list more than once. Depending on the size of your operation, this list might have to be subdivided into manageable bites, each one of which constitutes a project of its own.

An estimate of the financial impact that disaster recovery in a "post-9/11" world has on your organization, and the potential costs of not doing this planning, should also be included.