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When it comes to your technology hardware, you know it will have a limited lifespan before it must be replaced. The question is, how long does it make good business sense to continue using ageing hardware?
As a product gets older, the likelihood of failure will increase, resulting in downtime for staff and fee earners. By carefully monitoring equipment with a robust lifecycle management scheme, it is possible to balance the need to take advantage of the performance benefits that technology updates provide with the expense of doing so.
With the increase in memory and speed of hard drives, there are productivity gains to be had from the decreasing wait times for users, especially when they are fee earners. So while the equipment may not be broken and therefore does not need fixing, in reality, it is not working as efficiently and quickly as updated models.
Think about it in terms of your fee earners having to twiddle their thumbs for several minutes at a time while waiting for their computer to process information, and how much money in lost fees your firm will be losing as they do so. When one of our clients replaced its ageing desktop fleet, it became obvious very quickly that the fee earners were saving between five and ten minutes every day by not having to wait for their hardware to process. When you consider that the firm has 80 fee earners each charging £200 an hour, the return on investment of their updated hardware will not take long to recoup.
The tipping point
With robust and proactive lifecycle management, we can assess the best point at which your business needs to replace hardware before it slows down too much, does not work well with newer and more complex software, or begins to cause problems. By comparing the inefficiencies of older systems against the efficiencies of new technologies, you will arrive at the point at which you will gain maximum return on your investment. This is usually around every three or four years.