An Overview of the Organization

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services > 14. Analyzing and Reducing Costs > The Politics of Costs

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The Politics of Costs

At some pointin 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. Communicating these needs effectively requires that you explain costs clearly and make an effective 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 these represent a return on the company's investment in directory technology. For example, if the deployment of your directory and consolidation of LAN email packages have allowed you to reduce the time spent managing electronic mail accounts from 20 to 2 hours a week, that represents a concrete savings for your organization. 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, you may be too early in the directory's life cycle to have recovered all costs, but you can calculate the date when costs will be recovered.

To make your case even stronger, be sure to include revenue that is both directly and indirectly generated as a result 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 utilized and becoming popular among your users. You might maintain some type of usage data that shows the growth of your service; 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 we provide in this chapter, you can make a case that you've deployed your directory service in the most cost-effective manner possible.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services,  2002 New Riders Publishing
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Index terms contained in this section

communicating
          cost benefits 2nd
costs
          communicating the benefits of 2nd
directories
         costs
                    communicating the benefits of 2nd

2002, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services
Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672323168
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 245

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