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Do wireless LANs make sense? A step-by-step guide to determining what's right for your company.

Article Excerpt
Deciding to take your network wireless is a tough call. Here's a look at some of the pros and cons.

You've determined that the merits of deploying Wi-Fi across your enterprise outweigh the multitude of well-publicized issues surrounding Wi-Fi.

You've addressed the standard security concerns. You've rationalized the alphabet soup of standards. You've quantified the costs and qualified the benefits. You've even addressed how you will manage the Wi-Fi networks once they're deployed.

But have you formulated a sufficiently compelling case to get approval and funding? In the face of tough economic conditions, shrinking IT budgets, and increasing pressures to do more with less, how will your requests outweigh the merits of competing internal requests for the same finite source of funding?

Corporate management tends to be leery of investing in any emerging technology, especially if you cannot demonstrate hard benefits and return on investment and rationalize why it is appropriate to invest in the current state of that rapidly changing technology.

How will you prepare and present your case for Wi-Fi investment?

Preparing Your Case for Management

If your case for Wi-Fi is pragmatic and based on the reality of available technologies and near-term anticipated benefits, you will miss an opportunity to address what is on the minds of those who control your company's purse strings--namely, what will happen a year from now when more cellular data and Wi-Fi alternatives have arrived on the scene. In order to fully prepare your case and address a longer-term strategy for Wi-Fi, you will be well advised to address future wireless data scenarios and lay out how you see these future scenarios potentially converging with your near-term Wi-Fi scenario.

In doing so, you will need to address the issues that management really wants to know about:

* Why should I make this particular investment? How will it impact the business? Will it fundamentally transform how we do business?

* Why should the company fund your request for Wi-Fi versus investing in new product development, hiring more sales reps, upgrading or implementing a new business system, or making any other investment requested by other business units?

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