* Readers share their annual per user costs for Active Directory
A few weeks ago, I asked what your annual per user support costs were for Active Directory (see link below). This was brought on by the skimpy – and wide-ranging – results to a similar questions asked of the attendees at NetPro’s annual Directory Experts Conference.
Not all the attendees turned in a survey but among the 101 who did participate, fewer than 10% answered the support costs question. The results ranged from $6 per user per year to $1,500! About a third of those who ventured an answer (roughly 3% of all those who turned in the survey) claimed the per user, per year cost was approximately $400.
In the interest of, well, satisfying my curiosity, I asked you, dear readers, to let me know what your annual costs per user were.
Not really surprisingly, the answers you sent in averaged a bit over $350 per user. Whether that’s based on a scientific look at your support infrastructure, or fitting the facts to the expected answer is something I can’t judge. Nevertheless, it feels like a good number. The hard part, of course, isn’t totaling up your support costs but deciding which are attributable to Active Directory and which should be allocated to various applications and services. I mean, I’m sure it would be possible to figure out what your cost per user per year was to support Notepad, but gathering and examining the data would probably cost more than the whole Notepad support budget.
I’d expect, by the way, that in smaller enterprises the cost per user would be higher ($500-plus) while the largest organizations could introduce economies of scale pushing the per user cost down to $100 or so.
Figuring out your annual per user support costs does make it easier for you to get approval of some new automation projects, so it isn’t just an intellectual exercise. If you know, for example, that it costs you $50/user to reset forgotten passwords each year then licensing a self-service password reset utility for $10/user could have a significant, positive impact on your bottom line. Which do you suppose your CFO would like to hear – “I want to spend $10,000 so users can reset their own passwords,” or “I can save us $40,000 a year on support costs by letting users do for themselves something the helpdesk has had to do.”
Keep figuring out your support costs, and keep letting me know. We’ll revisit this from time to time to let you see how you stand vis-à-vis other organizations.
