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Gartner has finally achieved perfection.

Not content to rest on its laurels, it has supplemented its thoroughly meaningless Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation for personal computers with a perfectly ludicrous companion calculation for personal digital assistants. Are you ready for this? According to Gartner, an average PDA costs about $3,000 per year once all costs have been factored in.

This is a wonderful number, once put into context. To do so, allow me a bit of nostalgia: Back in September of 1997 I published my TCO calculation for an average day planner:

“Figure the day planner costs about $150. The time-management course itself probably costs the company another $150. And it requires a day of employee time, so at $40 per hour times 8 hours that equals $320. And every year you buy refills for about $50 — $200 over five years.

Add up the 15 minutes every morning you’re supposed to spend planning your day, and you get $12,000 over five years. During the day you may spend 10 minutes putting things on your to-do list and scratching them off. Over five years, that comes to another $8,000. In the evening, you are supposed to spend another 5 minutes recapping the day — over five years the cost is another $4,000. Then there is the time you spend fiddling with refills. That adds another $600. Add it all up, and the TCO for day planners is shocking: $25,420 over five years.”

Yes, that’s right. According to GartnerAccounting, a run-of-the-mill FranklinCovey day planner costs more than $5,000 per year, which means our friends at Gartner have unwittingly demonstrated that your average PDA will save your company about $2,000 annually.

Let’s do just a bit more math: An average PDA costs something like $200 and lasts at least three years. Using standard Internal Rate of Return calculations, we find PDAs deliver a tidy 2400% return on investment.

Life is just wonderful sometimes, isn’t it?

None of this means anything, of course. With just a modicum of ingenuity I’m pretty sure I could push the TCO for a simple desk to at least $6,000 per year, without even including the ergonomic chair.

Last week I launched the Value Prevention Society (VPS), an organization for IT professionals who focus on costs while ignoring benefits. In recognition of Gartner’s unflagging support for value prevention through its ongoing promotion of TCO, I’m happy to announce that the VPS board of directors has awarded Gartner a charter membership.

Their first task: Computing the TCO of a Gartner subscription.

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I’m offering you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a charter member of the Value Prevention Society. To qualify for VPS membership, just include, with your check for $950, a notarized copy of the page in your IT procedure manual that specifies total desktop lockdown.

VPS members allow nothing but MS Office and whatever enterprise application client-side software is required for each individual’s job. These are, after all, the company’s PCs, not the employees’, and if individual employees install anything else it could destabilize their PCs, kill the company in an SPA audit, and destroy all life on this planet. Besides, all employees want to do is to install games and screensavers, and these have no place on a corporate PC anyway.

Okay, I made the destroy-all-life bit up, but the rest is standard fare among the VPS crowd. And it’s a pile of baloney. Sliced thinly. Starting with the bit about a bad piece of software destabilizing PCs. Sure, a sufficiently bad application can destabilize any version of Windows now shipping. So only provide help for IT-approved software, and when there’s a problem, only commit to restoring a standard image and the My Documents folder. Since this situation will occur on about 0.2% of your company’s desktops annually, the impact on IT’s workload will be pretty small.

How about those SPA audits, though? That’s a tough one. Okay, I lied, it isn’t. Just require users to send you a scanned image of the installation disk for self-installed software, along with documentation of his or her manager’s approval. There’s plenty of software that can automatically inventory software to help you monitor conformance with this policy.

The most noxious argument, though, is that it’s the company’s PC. Of course it is. Which means it isn’t IT’s PC. IT has no business preventing other parts of the company from taking maximum advantage of information technology. Games? If you think you’re paid to prevent employees from playing games you should make decks of cards illegal too. Otherwise, let business managers do their jobs while you get back to yours.

For the most part, employees install software to make themselves more effective. When you prevent them from doing so, you might cut IT’s costs just a bit, but you’re reducing the benefits of information technology by a lot more.

If you think that’s a good trade-off, welcome to the VPS. We’re proud to have you as a member.

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