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To start, forget about what you are buying and focus on why you are buying.

Commit to paper the purposes to which you actually intend to put the technology.

This is the most important stage of managing technology. If you are not going to be doing video editing or playing graphics intensive games, you do not need high end video cards but will be fine with a computer that has integrated video. If that is the case you will save hundreds of dollars per machine. If the machine is not for entertainment or audio production, then you do not need high end audio capability and again will save significant money.

Make your list and take time to think it through.

Sample list for typical small business

• writing letters and other documents (word processing)
• budgeting, purchasing, payroll (spreadsheet, financial applications)
• customer records (database)
• share files among employees (local area network?)
• e-mail and web browsing (internet connectivity)
• scheduling (collaborative?)
• prospecting and sales development (database/CRM?)

Each of these requires assessment, consulting with employees and your own plans. How big will your customer database be? Will you need to provide for a prospecting or marketing database that is potentially many times as large as your customer file?

The size of your database and the complexity of operations you want to do will impact the kind of hardware you want to run it on as well as place some conditions on the software you use. If you are a small consulting firm that does no significant amount of data processing, it is wasteful to even devote time to learning how to use a database let alone buying the horse power to run one. But if you are going to be doing a lot of data work, generating business, sales and marketing reports regularly, then you will want that data to live on its own hard drive.

Once you have your carefully thought-out list look at it again and ask yourself if there are some functions that might happen only rarely but you think you might use in the future. Might you want to build pamphlets or ads? Then you may have to add desktop publishing to your list. Are you likely to want to use the system for multimedia, for example to listen to internet radio or view video podcasts?

If your purchase is genuinely aimed at the business, then avoid adding a lot of functions that do not make a real contribution to that business. If the business obtains no value from internet radio or multimedia web content, then keep those off your list.

Every major function adds to the power of the system you need and the amount of money you have to spend, not just for the hardware but for the software and support that may be required. If you can find a good consultant, he can play a major role in this assessment process by asking the right questions and helping you to consider what you really want to accomplish.

But beware. The industry is full of people who, well intentioned or otherwise, simply push choices and promises that lead to sometimes never-ending tweaking and upgrading and training and repurchases. You will almost always save money, time and grief by having a consultant that does not also sell hardware or software but is a true consultant able to lead the process for you.

Assuming that the sample list above is your complete requirement, the hardware you need is modest. You can obtain what you need for no more than a few hundred dollars per machine, particularly since some of the function can be effectively offloaded from your system to free or cheap web resources, covered next section.

Be clear about the number of systems you will need and any differences in the functions to be carried out by each system. If you need two machines in your small business, one for you and one for the receptionist, then consider your different needs. You may be best served by a laptop, for example.

If you are a large company looking to purchase 1,000 machines, you are already wasting shareholder money if that is actually how you assess the need. It is almost certainly the case that no such a need would be for 1,000 identical tasks. Rather the 1,000 is capable of being broken into functional sets. Those functional sets will include their own particular need profiles and this needs to be carefully documented before any purchasing intentions are entertained.

2. Do not buy the newest/best/most expensive
3. Don’t pay for what is free — Use Open Source
4. E-mail
5. Collaboration
6. Do Real World Testing

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