improve our operating efficiency or product quality. Of course, we might develop new customers and/or products. Business threats are also diverse. Our sales volume or margins might be down. Competitors might have a cost advantage from technology or labor cost. We might already be losing market share to competition or have com petitors routinely beat us on price, speed of response, or product introduc tion. Expectations of customer service might be increasing, or demographic changes might be altering our customers or workforce. New or changing sales channels might need different support processes. Companies in our industry might be changing in size through mergers and acquisitions. A regulatory change may affect our business environment or our operations The technology situation includes an assessment of the current system and available replacement technologies and processes. It is difficult to assess an existing complex system. An assessment team needs to bring a variety of skills and points of view and be very open to working together. Nobody will nderstand the old and the new equally, so the whole must be greater than arts Technologies change so fast that by the me a system is deployed the architecture is often obsolete. The team must understand the old system well enough without too much work. Maintainers of the old system will understand it, but may have an exaggerated sense of its complexity and value. A common problem is to end up wri ng the same system over. If important details are not specified sufficiently, the implementation team gets them from the system users and maintainers, although it was the potential offered by new technology that justified the migration cost It may be difficult to get good measurements on performance o the current system. People involved with existing systems generally do not report accurately on the customer satisfaction and reliability of the system. They measure what they do well, or what they can measure, not nec essarily what matters.
The areas to assess for a system include:
Size, performance, complexiry, condition of applications
Hardware and software infrastructure
Current staffing, service requests, and workload
Costs
Problems that the current system cannot address