Punctuated scalability. It's a term I invented ripped offfrom Stephen Jay Gould's concept of punctuated equilibrium and it's a way tothink about support cost. Here's what I mean. Look at this graph where we havecost per employee over here and number of employees over here. In mostorganizations the graph looks like this. In other words, when you have a smallnumber of employees, you have really high upfront costs to start with. So thecost per employee is really high, but as the organization grows and you makemore hires, the actual cost per employee declines even as the aggregate costfor support increases. So well, punctuated scalability is another way to lookat this. Let's look at this chart down here. Here we have number of employeesjust like up here, but we have the total support cost, not the cost peremployee, and when you graph it that way, you're going to see something thatlooks like this.
What's going on? Well, what happens is, there are pointsalong this graph as you add more employees. We have big jumps in your supportcost. For example, software licensing. If you have a software license that onlygives you 25 seats, for the first employee up to the 25th employee, that costdoesn't increase at all, but once you make the 26th employee into theorganization, you'll have to buy a bunch of more seats and so you have a hugespike in cost. So you've got to be concerned about licensing when it comes toscalability.
You've also got hardware. Obviously, you have to make surethat everyone has a desktop, or a laptop. But there is also storageconsiderations. A certain number of printers that can only be handled by acertain number of users and there again, you might have to add another networkprinter for every 10th or 15th employee and that's going to push these costs upalong the way.
And then finally there's the whole question of supporttechnicians themselves, the people who provide support. In most organizations,there is a ratio. One support tech covers x number of employees. So when youget to this point and you get to that x+1 employee, you've got to go out andhire another support tech, and as the organization grows you have to go out anddo that repeatedly. So by punctuated scalability, I'm saying be aware of thesechoke points within the life of the organization where your spending issuddenly going to increase dramatically.
