What is the impact of the roadmaps of your IT vendors on your organisation’s strategy?
An obvious example is the discontinuation of support for Windows XP from April 2014. If your firm focuses on price leadership, then the costs of upgrades, hardware refreshes, operating system choices, staff training are balanced against improvements in productivity, lower computer fleet running costs, and so on.
If your business focuses on product/service differentiation, then if key applications are only capable of running on Windows XP some serious choices would need to be made. Do we build new, do we keep the current app and so on.
The same would go for technologies such as storage, wireless, email, and so on. Are those products nearing end of life? Have you got 6 months, 12 months are just a few weeks left? What is it going to cost you to upgrade (can you?), replace (what’ll be the impact?), or doing something new (what is your business strategy)?
Technology is all the way through the value chain. You need to keep an eye on the life cycle of the technology.
IT Considerations 
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