Excellent knowledge exchange on IT estimating

Last week I had the honour of presenting the opening keynote on the Galorath Conference. Although organised by a vendor of Cost Estimating Software it was an excellent and open knowledge exchange on IT estimating. The conference had a well balanced line-up of speakers who presented different pieces of the puzzle to estimate the cost of different aspects of IT cost estimation. All presentations should be available on the Galorath website soon, but here is my personal impression:

Estimating & Pricing Application Management for Oracle EBS

Although Application Management consumes 70-80% of the Total Cost of Ownership, estimating and benchmarking the related effort still receives little attention. Apparently, estimating Application Management is not so simple. One of the main reasons for this, is the fact that the scope of Application Management is more diffuse than the scope of a project.

When we have defined what activities are in scope for an Application Management service offering, we are able to model this and use this model as a basis to estimate the related effort and cost. To be able to do this in a transparent way, based on experience data, we have combined the vision of our Service Component Model with the estimating power and references of SEER IT.

Next week I will present this on the 2011 SEER International Conference in Eindhoven. Although it is organised by Galorath it will have a general focus on the advancement of software estimation. Therefore this conference is proudly sponsored by Ordina.

The Price of IT

We are far beyond the days of the internet bubble where you could ask any price for anything that had to do with IT. Most of us realize that IT consists of products and services like in any other industry. Because of the less tangible nature of our products and services the IT industry still has a mystical aura to a lot of people. Claims that IT would become a commodity shocked the world a few years ago. From that perspective it is only logical that one of the most popular books on software estimation, written by Steve McConnell, has a subtitle: Demystifying the Black Art.

To share my experiences in making IT estimation and pricing a more mature topic I started this blog. I hope it helps in demystifying the subject of the price of IT.