What did I learn from this class? Well for one, I understand how IT fits into the overall budget of an organization and I now know that it’s not easy, it’s not cheap by far, but nevertheless it is essential. It’s important to understand a company’s overall technology goals before developing a budget. If technology is integral to the business operations, then the level of spending required will likely be substantial. Ironically, the size of a business doesn’t necessarily determine the level of spending required. It’s determined solely on the type and scope of technology needed to support the overall goals. Does the company want technology to improve IT accessibility for its staff? Is the company looking to improve its ability to respond to customers’ needs? The overall goal for implementing technology plays an important part in defining an IT budget. Once an IT team gets past that, now comes the fun part, NUMBERS. These numbers need to be frugal enough to get the budget approved, however costly enough to get the essentials covered. I also understand the concepts of total cost of ownership and I must say that in my opinion, the total cost of ownership is the single most important principle in all of supply chain management. It quantifies and measures costs and of course, ownership brings purchase costs, but ownership can also bring substantial costs for installing, deploying, operating, upgrading, and maintaining the same assets. For many kinds of acquisitions, the (tco) analysis finds a very large difference between purchase price and the total life cycle costs, especially when viewed across a long ownership period which I found very interesting.
The next thing I learned which I must say I was very interested in, especially because I’ve quite often heard the word capitol but never knew what it was, was to know the difference between capitol versus operating