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Subject:Back to the Dark Ages? (Take II: a sneaky trick) From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 18 Jun 2002 15:32:50 -0400
I forgot to mention one sneaky little trick I used a long time ago. We
wanted to get a few Macs into our shop because at the time, they were the
only game in town for serious desktop publishing. So I proposed a small
"proof of concept" study in which they rented me a Mac while I collected
statistics on time and cost savings. The store that rented us the Mac agreed
to treat this as a "lease to own" deal, and by the time we'd completed a
long enough study to gather decent baseline data, we'd pretty much already
bought the computer; it would've been foolish to return it, and the buyout
value remaining in the lease was low enough that my manager bought my Mac
from her own budget.
This worked for a few reasons: First, we were sneaky and deceptive--at least
from the viewpoint of the MIS folk. Second, though capital spending was
under the thumb of the MIS department, managers had full authority to spend
their budgets on ongoing expenses such as leasing and on _small_ capital
expenditures. Third, my manager was a full accomplice in this scheme. Last
but most important, we demonstrated a significant cost savings--enough to
justify bringing in another three Macs.
There are undoubtedly lessons to be learned here about understanding and
exploiting the existing system, but I wouldn't be so rash as to suggest you
learn from them. <g>
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
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