Chapter 15. Analyzing and Reducing Costs

• The Politics of Costs

• Reducing Costs

• Design, Piloting, and Deployment Costs

• Ongoing Costs of Providing Your Directory Service

• Analyzing and Reducing Costs Checklist

• Further Reading

• Looking Ahead

To design, develop, and deploy a successful directory service, you need to have the proper funding. Getting funding from your organization invariably means understanding the costs of the service you plan to deploy, developing a budget, and communicating that information to those who hold the purse strings. Because budgets are often subject to negotiation, it's also wise to prioritize the items in your directory service budget so that you know which aspects of your budget are negotiable and which are not.

In this chapter we provide an overview of the various costs associated with the phases of a directory service's life cycle. For the purposes of this chapter, we break the life cycle into two major sections: the design, pilot, and deployment phase (everything preceding going to production); and the maintenance and upgrade phase (everything after production service begins).

This chapter isn't meant to be a comprehensive guide to project planning and budgeting; that topic is covered adequately in other texts (see the Further Reading section at the end of this chapter). Instead, we focus on directory-specific costs that you need to consider when planning and budgeting. We also describe ways to reduce costs during your directory's life cycle. Your company may have a well-established planning and budgeting process in place. If that is the case, use the information in this chapter to assist you as you work with the existing process.

This chapter is necessarily incomplete. Each directory deployment is unique and targeted at meeting specific needs. Your directory may not incur some of the costs described in this chapter, and it may incur some costs that we haven't thought of. Use this chapter as a guide to the general types of costs associated with providing a directory service, but be flexible as you think about your particular directory service and its budget.