Experimental LiFe

I have just had a chance to visit a company and have learned about their IT infrastructures. At that place, there are quite many custom applications for each department. Although many department has same business process, each one does their own procurement for software and IT management. Information system department plays minor role and keeps supporting the users.

Some thinks that the way we allow user-centric technology enable users to keep paces with innovation and new technology as they can initiate any ideas without conflicts with IT team which plays only support roles not effect the actual performance of the organization as a whole. With this approach, users in each department get alert to compete with another department to apply new technology and add value to their current process. Apparently, embracing too many technology, various platform, database, h/w infrastructures, would cause very high cost of maintenance. From the user point of view, they told me that this could trade off with total cost of ownership. They think that with several softwares for same business process, they can switch from vendor to vendor freely and thus this can reduce total cost of ownership.

On the other hand, another company, which I have ever worked for, uses IT team oriented approach. The change to embrace new technology initiated and sponsored by IT team and users still give key business requirements. In this latter approach, I could feel that the users team always have questions and problem with limitations and capabilities of software. The advantage of this approach is that IT team can control the IT strategy, platform and h/w procurement thus they can control overall cost of IT maintenance in long term.

There is still the question out there how we can evaluate the cost to implement each software project with measurable TCO and ROI.. It would be great if someone can throw me some light..?!?