I spend a lot of my time talking to CIOs, CTOs, and business-side executives and how to better integrate IT into the strategic fabric of organizations. I was having a discussion recently with an IT executive from a major corporation around his expectation of virtual desktops and he made a statement that started me thinking; his business executives are requiring a six month, or sometimes less, return-on-investment (ROI) on significant IT projects, "can a virtual desktop project give me that?"
There are multiple facets to overall quickness of ROI for some IT projects, but the part that stands out prominently for me are the demands for rapid ROI don't match up for virtual desktop projects. There are some very good conversations around the ROI of a virtual desktop project, but the ROI that I have seen, which I think is on the optimistic end of the scale, is 14 months. Can you do a full-scale virtual desktop implementation and achieve a positive ROI is 9+ months? Highly unlikely. So if 6 months or less is the directive that some CIOs are having to live by for some major IT projects, how do you do virtual desktop projects and achieve that timeframe? Do you carve the project up into smaller pieces? do you pick the "low-hanging" fruit to get that quick win?
Steve Kaplan wrote back in September on his site http://www.bythebell.com that the ROI of VDI was real. I agree that it is real, but his timeframe for ROI was 9.3 months; again I have a tough time believing that. His numbers make sense, but I question the overall scope of the project.
The other issue that I have with businesses demanding a less than six month ROI for some IT projects is that doesn't this move the CIO from working hard to be strategic back to the tactically-focused, firefighter, lightkeeper that they have been straddled with for the past many years
What do you think? Will a less than six month ROI requirement slow the adoption of virtual desktop technology?
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