IT Asset Disposition: Have an Idea How Much your Old Computers are costing you?

In a bid to keep the annual bottomline consistently on the green, some of us fall prey to the phrase ‘save yourself poor’ when it comes to IT asset disposition.

But ever reasoned that this money you are ‘saving’ could be negatively impacting on your bottomline because these are finances you could actually be saving instead of throwing into constant repairs and upgrades? Probably not.

The point is, holding onto old computer systems may be hurting you more in the long run because you have to incur costs on repair and upgrading the inferior systems on a constant basis.

The Big Question

Ask yourself if downtime is costing you more in terms of productivity than you are saving on refusing to purchase new computers.

If yes, it’s high time you stepped up your search for an IT asset recovery firm that can help you in obsolete asset liquidation in an environmentally-friendly, data-secure manner. If you are not convinced and are reluctant that you can get by pretty good, perhaps we need to put things into better perspective.

Sixty percent of small business clientele are of the view that a company is outdated if it’s running its operations with computers and operating systems aged 5 to 10 years. You need to come to grip with the fact that this is 2015, not the year 2004 when you could get away with it.

And mind you, that is just small business. You can imagine what people would think of the computers and systems running life-support machines, or better yet, the county office handling their deed.

What customers want to know (you included when you visit other ‘business premises’) is if the people you are dealing with are using cutting-edge technology. And in this day and age, you can forgive the sense of entitlement, it’s what the world has come to. And it’s not just your customers: your staff want the same assurance too. In the chance that they are forced to accomplish a task on their smartphone because it’s apparently faster than the computer at work (which doubles up as a morale killer), that’s red alert: you need to do asset disposition ASAP and upgrade your systems.

Actually, you may have heard of the term BYOD. It stands for Bring Your Own Device, and it’s a term for this crop of employees bringing their own devices to work, a culture propagated mostly by the millennials who are joining the workforce today.

It’s a generation that’s never been removed from these devices even in school, as David Willis (Gartner mobility and communications research head honcho) once told CNBC in 2013. So when they enter the work environment and encounter a heavy computer and antiquated smartphone, they deem it a step backward.

More Costs

There are other costs in play too. They include:

Migration/Installation – many businesses lack the processes to decommission what we can call medieval software, so what they do is start from scratch with broad migration and installation services.

Data security – the risk associated with using your software increases the older it gets. It may be lacking in terms of offering a safeguard against attacks, but strong data security is totally vital. And it comes at a cost.

Data loss – there are those IT issues that emanate from integrating different software programs. When one program is out of date and the other is updated, there tends to be a miscommunication – definitely an issue you’ve come across even with your home computer. The result is potential data loss, not to mention potential loss in revenue.

A Ponemon Institute survey of healthcare and IT professionals in 2013 established that outdated technology costs hospitals alone $8 billion every year. This is $3 billion going to a lengthy discharge process, with the remaining $5 billion going down the drain due to decreased doctor productivity and obsolete tech such as pagers (and you thought PDAs were outmoded!)

Bell Labs noted in a paper in 2012 that the sweet spot of proper IT life cycle management lies in finding a middle ground between doing IT asset disposition too frequently and not doing it sufficiently enough. Businesses that try to forcefully extend the equipment’s useful life will not only find the ageing equipment cringing at some point, but also becoming a constraint to the organization.

Fact.