An interesting area business case writers often miss, especially those in a technical or operational capacity, is Opportunity Cost.
For those who aren’t in the know, in economic terms Opportunity Cost is defined as “A benefit, profit, or value of something that must be given up to acquire or achieve something else”
In practical real life terms, this could mean the costs of your resources spending time on day to day admin, support and maintaining the as-is, as opposed to concentrating on new projects and initiatives to drive the business forward.
This has implications to the business – the Opportunity Cost means all those decisions you couldn’t make, projects that have been delayed and stakeholders who depend on you cannot be satisfied, because your time is taken up with laborious day to day activities.
Opportunity Cost is a critical measure of moving an IT operation from a fire-fighting, reactive, cost centre; to a service orientated, pro-active state.
Managed Services, particularly in the data platform, can have a tremendous impact on mitigating workloads and resource management within an IT Operation.
For instance, more often than not, Big Data is a key agenda to most CIO’s. However it’s also one of the hardest to recruit for. DBA’s are often best placed to cross train and move into a Data Analytics role. Backfilling with a Managed Service in this scenario can rocket Big Data initiatives by applying resource already familiar with your business and data platforms.
Therefore, because you’re interested in delivering value back to your business, and because you want to ensure your staff progress and because you understand the value in thinking strategically, means an evaluation of a DBA Managed Service is a step in the direction you want to take!