Having just wrapped up the last post in my series on selling technology to executives, I took one last look at what I wrote and realized that the proper cost accounting treatment I described in one passing sentence needed to be corrected. Checking in with my truly wonderful editor, Kristine, I learned that my final post had already gone to press. Rather than adding the insight to the original article, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to prove a key point in my series: when it comes to cost accounting, nothing is ever black and white and even “us finance guys” miss a digit once in a while (especially when  trying to offer a simple explanation for what is truly a mathematically complex concept.) More...

In this post I want to dive right into another real-world example about how WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network), with its virtually free route diversity, provides an ROI to a variety of enterprises. To give you an understanding of some pretty complex cost accounting concepts that even CPAs struggle with, the retail industry offers a good model, since we all participate in it and it’s very easy to visualize even if we don’t know the business. More...

In recent blog articles, I have been focusing on “Selling Technology Investments to the ‘C’ Suite.” As regular readers know, I often talk about the “Three Pillars of Technology Investment” as a model to think in business terms about how ROI is achieved. In this series, I drilled down to talk more about hard and soft costs and benefits and about the amorphous and oft-misunderstood concept of sunk or “non-differential” costs. Now I want to turn to some real world examples of technology investment in Wireless WAN (WWAN) technology using these concepts. More...

I didn't spend much time in J-school (journalism) before I transferred to B-school (business), but I recall that it is not proper to return from a hiatus in writing without explaining why you have been away for so long. More...

As the fourth post in this series about selling executives on the ROI of technology investments, I am going to address one of the most complex areas of accounting: sunk costs. It’s easy to argue anything is sunk in the short run, but in the long-run, it can be very difficult to spot a truly sunk cost. More...

As the third post in this series about selling executives on the ROI of technology investments, I want to talk more about how one identifies and models soft costs and benefits. I have been using the analogy of a light switch and a light bulb to talk about hard costs and benefits. The thing that makes a simple light switch scenario “hard” is the high probability that an action (flipping a switch as an analog for making an investment) will indeed create the intended result (turning on or off the light resulting in a hard cost or hard benefit respectively.) More...

In my last post, I talked about technology investments and the need to sell them to your company decision-makers in business terms rather than technology terms. Today, I want to give some examples of exactly what needs to be done to successfully procure capital to invest in longer-term and greater-yield technology investments. More...

A recent post, “This Old Infrastructure,” talked about convergence strategy and how companies can think about technology investments from a business perspective. If your job is to identify and fight for those investments, you'll be more successful at getting a piece of that limited capital if you can translate value of the investments into business terms. More...

I recall Norm Abrams, of the PBS series “This Old House” and “New Yankee Workshop” once saying that when remodeling an old house, you “could only do what the house would let you do.”  That’s true of investing in convergence technology too, but the smaller the house (or business), the fewer limitations you  have.  With a small house, you can often build a huge addition without much concern for  the original house. But with a large house, you often choose to knock down walls instead of just adding-on to the existing space; and if a wall is discovered to be load-bearing, you’ll either have to abandon some aspect of your original plans or pay exorbitant costs to reinforce the structure. More...