CFOs frequently ask me what the best computer for their business is. This usually occurs when they are scratching their heads over a budget request from their IT folks. This is an impossible question, similar to the question: What is the best car?

When you are a young, single guy, you would give one answer to the “best car” question; when you are a middle-age dad with four kids, you give a completely different answer. The same holds true when determining the best computer for your business. The only correct answer: It depends …

Writing for Efficient Enterprise, I recently tackled this question in a different form. Here, the IT people were trying to make sense of a slew of new servers based on the latest chip technology. However, there is a pretty straightforward way for the CFO to make sense of computer technology requests without having to wade into the techno-babble of it all. And CFOs do need to make sense of IT, which can have significant impact on the balance sheet.

The easy answer to which computer is best for the business used to be simple: The computer that runs your most important applications. Today, your most important applications probably run on computers from multiple vendors. You can run Oracle applications, for example, on cheap Windows servers, on expensive Windows servers, on computers running the Linux operating system, or on very big and expensive enterprise servers running various flavors of UNIX. So the application alone is no longer an effective guide.

Instead, I recommend that you consider a number of factors:

1. The application — Your key applications still matter, so you have to make sure that the application will run comfortably on the computer now and for the time over which you are going to amortize it.

2. The total cost of ownership (TCO) — This includes not just the cost of the initial acquisition, which can be deceptively low, but the full cost of acquiring, maintaining, and supporting that computer over its lifetime of service. Some computers need much more care and feeding. Others consume significantly more energy. (Energy costs often are ignored, I suspect, because neither the CIO nor the CFO ever sees the actual electric bill.)

3. Your organization’s IT capabilities — Some computers are so easy to install and run that almost any idiot can do it. Others require serious technical skill. Either way, there are trade-offs: A device that is easy to install may have limited functionality or hinder the organization in ways a device requiring technical skills would not.

4. Your organization’s risk tolerance — If your organization has a very low risk tolerance, you will limit your options to those from the large, well-known vendors. If you can tolerate greater risk, maybe because the organization has good IT skills, you have more options.

However, the organization may not have to invest in a computer at all. There are other ways to get computer services. Any number of IT service providers, outsourcing vendors, or cloud computing providers may be able to meet your organization’s computing needs without you ever having to determine the best computer. ###