Costs

Process

What do you need to think about in order to model costs as part of the business plan.  Factors such as internal vs. external
1.  What are your business requirements for digital preservation? (short-term, long-term, mandate, legal???) and factor this into the costs
2.  What is the scale of the programme you are proposing?  (Is it a project, phased, or full blown program???)
3.  Files types (assets)(what part of the collection or collections are you proposing to preserve)
4.  What is the current environment?  Do you have internal capacity? appetite?
5.  What type of system and processes are you proposing (external system (with minimal on-site support or in-house development)
6.  Identify potential sources of funding (internal, external, core, project)
7.  Staffing  (Current capacity, can you move staff, how agile is the organization to move people around?)
8.  Training, Immediate and Continuous (skills and skills gap) (what is your current state?  Do you need to skill up quickly or keep people in-the-loop)

Content

How do you start determining costs?

Scenarios

1. Determine/estimate costs for infrastructure:
2. Determine/estimate costs for training
3. Determine/estimate costs for staffing
4. Recurrent costs

Communications

As relevant for all aspects of the business case

Resources

Minnesota Historical Society cost modeling. http://www.mnhs.org/preserve/records/legislativerecords/carol/costmodels.htm Minnesota Historical Society. Digital Preservation Case Study Information. http://www.mnhs.org/preserve/records/legislativerecords/docs_pdfs/DigitalPreservationBusinessCaseInformationCRK10_5_2011.pdf