Essay on Repair / Replace Decisions for Automation Systems

Introduction
Information technology or IT assets have a direct and significant impact on the achievement of corporate objectives and in fact they may be critical to corporate operations. Companies and businesses in the present day and age are heavily dependant on their IT assets which may include computers, network components, storage devices, software components and mobile computing assets to provide services to customers and maintain normal operations. Hence, it is important that as much as possible, the downtime associated with these IT assets be minimized and the reliability as well as the availability of the assets and systems be maximized. Also, as much as possible redundancy should be built into the system design so that any failures should have a minimal disruptive impact on corporate operations. However, the IT systems also need to be designed with cost considerations in mind and hence the overall design and operation of IT assets and systems need to be optimized for costs (James, 2005).

Faced with a need to operate and maintain IT assets and systems at optimal costs to the organization, it is necessary for maintenance managers and administrators to make repair or replace decisions for assets which have malfunctioned. Some of the considerations associated with such a decision may involve considerations associated with the cost of downtime, the repair versus replacement costs, the capability to affect a repair within reasonable time and budgets, reparability, cost and complexity of an asset and the skills as well as the maintenance equipment which have to be acquired in order to make repair possible. Obviously, hardware IT assets with warranty are not the headache of the user and should always be referred to the supplier who, if they are reputable, will repair or replace the asset within a reasonable time. Hence, it is always important to check that there are warranties associated with purchasing on credit or lease that have been extended by the finance company............

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY