Ugh! Cost factors! Isn't this where the paper really starts to drag? Geez, sure hope not!

Actually, this is an essential part of the paper, cost management is crucial. So what will be attempted here is to look at it from two perspectives. The first is "how can you supercharge your Windows DNA project if you have to work with an economy budget?" The second is "how can you supercharge your Windows DNA project if you can work with a premium budget?"

Aren't you going to get better results if you have a premium budget to work with? There is no doubt you will. But, consider this, you can also leverage the power of others whose budgets far outstrip your own. In particular, Microsoft and it's customers have already invested billions on your behalf.

So, this section will look at different cost factors starting with economical approaches and moving toward premium approaches.

There are lots of free resources on the Web to help you including this Website. The main cost to you is the time to research. But if you are limited on funds, or just want to conserve them, time is a best friend!

WARNING! Using this approach can wind up being more costly than investing in a more premium approach in the first place. So, it really should best be used conservatively or in a case where there just aren't enough funds to power-up a Cadillac!

REVERSE-WARNING! There are some extremely bright people out there who can work with the most minimal of resources and develop something incredible. This paper assumes you must be one of those!

Bottom-Line: If you are greatly constrained by economics, or just want to leverage the available free resources, plug into the Internet and use that as a way to supercharge your Windows DNA project. ⁷

Actually it is BOTH! The days where technology could be separated from business are gone.

Now, and in the future, information technology processes and business processes are absolutely one in the same. All business work is at least 50% information work, according to Michael Dertouzos⁸, director of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and author of "What Will Be."

So, an extremely economical approach that can reap huge financial benefits is to carefully link technology processes to business processes and vice-versa. Any technology investment, including a software or hardware investment, is a business investment. Any such investment should require a business case before a decision is made to invest. One warning though, use a quick process for analysis and approval. If you have a mammoth bureaucracy with a long chain of slow to obtain signatures and approvals, that is no good! One way to get out of this mire is to establish a Digital Nervous System so that such a case is quick and easy to develop and automatically route very quickly through any approval chain that is there.

Bottom-Line: Without spending a dime, make sure your Windows DNA project is both a technology project and a business project. Build a business case for it and don't let it languish in an approval cycle nightmare. If it's a good project, get it going and get it done, business has to move forward now at the speed of thought!

At the next level of economy, with modest expenditure, you can plug-in to all kinds of seminars, classes, books, magazines, and the MSDN and TechNet programs with Microsoft.

Hopefully, this Website will be doing a better and better job of pointing you in the direction of either free or low-cost resources to add to your DNA artillery. So, be sure to check out the Interesting NewsBits, Literature, and Learn About DNA pages as well.

Next, I highly recommend going to the Microsoft seminars as well as any other great ones you can get to. This is an excellent way to supercharge your Windows DNA projects.

The MSDN Universal subscription is an outstanding resource because it includes all the interim shipments of Windows software, the entire BackOffice Test Platform, the Office Test Platform, other platforms such as NetShow Theatre Server, the Software Development Kits (SDKs), the Device-driver Development Kits (DDKs), and optionally upon request, the International versions of Windows. If you can't afford the Universal subscription, then the Professional subscription is a good bet. Visual Studio 6.0 users can get the MSDN library for free.

Then, I highly recommend getting certified in as many areas as you can. There is a book out by Ed Tittel called Certification Success from Coriolis Press that covers the major certs you can try and achieve. On the newsgroups, I have observed a lot of debate going on about the value of certifications and some of the criticism seems well-placed; however, the real value of certifications is that they can help you focus and fill in gaps, and that knowledge is essential if you plan to supercharge your Windows DNA project!

At the next level, I would recommend considering going back to school and get another degree, or at least part of one, or if you are close to a PhD already, structuring your own program. Here the expense of both time and dollars is higher, but the results can far outweigh the costs. Now, if you are an executive, you can afford to have your best and brightest people come and teach you what you don't know, or hire outside consultants, or bring professors to your company and teach you onsite so that you will both benefit from the exchange of information. You can also meet with other top executives and either present to them or have them present to you or just share in a roundtable discussion format the best practices you know. If you want to supercharge your Windows DNA project, do any or all of this, as much as you possibly can!

Finally, Microsoft has a structured program for learning via self-study, online, and via classroom. The classroom is Microsoft's preferred method for you to learn their systems and technologies. Here again, do as much as you can and spend as generously as you can in the training area. This is almost always a fantastic investment. As a way to supercharge your Windows DNA projects, it just can't be beat!

Bottom-Line: For a lower- to moderate-cost investment, read books and magazines, go to seminars (or listen to them streaming over the Net), take classes, get certified, get degrees, network with other people, and dig into MSDN and TechNet as deep as you can go. All these focuses will add fuel to the fire needed to supercharge your Windows DNA project. With so many opportunities, even if you had unlimited cash resources, there isn't enough time to do it all! So, what is a person to do?

Focus on quality! Limit the content of your exposure to the best resources with the most to offer in the shortest possible amount of time. Custom design your program to fit what you need, but don't short change yourself and miss getting a great general education or ample recreation! It's okay to have a life! Check with your doctor first, but if you get a green light, set the bars a little higher for yourself and attempt to produce more in a shorter amount of time. You know that old report that used to take you all weekend to write? Well, next time give yourself two hours to do the same thing and get it over and done with. That will free up some time for other things right there.

A few years back, I sat down in a conference room with some consultants to evaluate their proposal to help us upgrade some enterprise systems. Other consultant proposals were considered. A couple of them were outstanding providers, but enormously expensive, way over what the budget could support. I began to think about what all these proposals had in common. The term for it was:

That is what they all advocated, ripping out the old IT infrastructure and replacing it with a new IT infrastructure. Suprisingly, all the consulting teams recommended this approach without ever doing a physical walkthrough of the facilities. Had they done that, they would have discovered that this particular infrastructure had a number of highly specialized systems and lots of applications tied to the MS-DOS platform--incapable of running under Windows.

Other systems were UNIX specific. Just a few years earlier, the shop had migrated completely off an IBM mainframe and ported special programs written in assembler to COBOL under MS-DOS. While COBOL is a fabulous language and extremely efficient for processing huge files, at that time, the available choices for a COBOL compiler under Windows was not what we would consider great. Another factor was that the company's clients were using AS/400 as well as mainframes, and an array of other specialty technologies.

We turned down all the proposals and came up with a new hybrid. We wanted to utilize their assistance with the Windows workstation deployments, and for sure eliminate some older systems, such as 10-Base-2. But, we also wanted to achieve a cooperating infrastructure that would allow slow migration of older applications that had no Windows equivalent. By doing this, we achieved an immediate cost savings of 61.5% from the original lowest proposal.

The business lesson is that a pure rip and replace mentality can be a bad thing even as much as a pure leave-in-place mentality can be. In this instance, had we adopted the rip and replace approach, it would have devastated the ongoing business operations by leaving critical applications in an inoperable state. Fortunately for us, Windows NT was interoperable with the legacy systems and software in place, so it supported us. We were able to interoperate with a variety of legacy systems including Novell, UNIX, and MS-DOS.

As a result, it wasn't necessary to port or rewrite any old applications, the Cheyenne ArcServe backup system running under Novell was still operational and able to access customer files required by contract, and we achieved a massive performance boost with the new quad processor server running NT and fast ethernet with capacity for a gigabit backplane.

Bottom-Line: One way to optimize technology investments is to reuse existing systems and code. A pure rip and replace mentality may be the wrong approach. The extreme opposite approach might also be wrong. In some cases, it makes sense to yank out old technology and cut-over immediately to new technology. At other times though, a more gradual migration approach is better. It really depends on the state of the infrastructure already in place. Take special care to remain flexible in this area. To supercharge your Windows DNA project, take this thinking into account and make it easier for a future migration to take place. That migration will come, it may take three or five or ten years, but rest assured, it will come.

A fantastic, low-cost way to conserve capital is to test a pilot project before you invest the really big bucks. This is the strategy used by Microsoft when it used it's MS-Sales⁹ data warehouse and decision support system to find new ways to generate profit and establish greater customer goodwill. You can read more about this in Bill Gates' book.

Bottom-Line: To supercharge your Windows DNA project, try a scaled-down version first. Use rapid prototyping to test a small pilot with your users and see what it tells you.

Way back in June of 1998, Microsoft announced it was forming a partnership with Hewlett-Packard and the CoreTech Consulting Group¹⁰ to start what is known as DevLab. This lab was specifically designed to provide a "Boot Camp" where developers could spend one week learning about Windows DNA and getting a jumpstart on their first project. I first heard about DevLab sometime prior to the June announcement when CoreTech was searching for an Engagement Manager. This really intrigued me, but at the time I did not want to move to Pennsylvania, otherwise, the opportunity sounded fantastic!

But since I could not go there myself, I resolved that I would focus on every skillset they wanted for their engagement manager and create my own DevLab. So that is what I have been doing for the last two years! Someday I hope to have a chance to sign up for a DevLab session at one of the team facilities. But if you have the resources, don't wait for me, go there yourself!

Bottom-Line: If you want to really supercharge your Windows DNA development effort, sign-up for DevLab and all it can offer.

This is one of my favorite topics! It is amazing that every AACSB-accredited MBA program teaches the use of Net Present Value concepts and a few teach the use of Real Options for new investment projects, but hardly anyone makes use of it! Business can't break free of the old ROI and incremental investment models that have been around for so long. But the top minds in economics, finance, and accounting certainly advocate these new techniques.

In their book, Downes and Mui state, "While [the ROI] approach is appropriate for incremental efforts, it can't possibly work for investing in new technologies, new ventures, or innovation generally. How can senior management, let alone I/S professionals often untrained in either finance or strategy, hope to estimate the benefit of a technology that doesn't even exist in the form of a good or service?"¹¹

In my estimation, these guys are dead on target!

Now, a drawback of these techniques is that they can be difficult to apply accurately and they are a bit exotic. But, accurately applied, these techniques are the far superior approach to valuing new technology investments. If you don't know how to use these techniques, hire a consultant. Check out the associates page within this site and consider contacting Dr. David Nachman for assistance.

Bottom-Line: To put the icing on the cake, a premium approach is to bring in a top-notch advisor who is intimately familiar and experienced with using real options to value investments. If you are not using options to value your portfolio of new investments, you could be making serious financial errors. Those would include funding projects that shouldn't be funded; not funding projects that should be funded; picking less than stellar performers from among the options available; and choosing to fund options too early or too late.

Just as you would not expect to write something like the Windows NT operating system yourself, there are times when it makes total sense to bring in solutions from the outside. It is more cost-effective and you tap into expertise that you really need to supercharge your Windows DNA project.

Bottom-Line: You can save money, speed up operations, and flexibly scale your operations by using outside solutions. This is a great way to supercharge your Windows DNA project.