2 Develop your own argument to counter the CFO’s case. You are a chief information officer (CIO) for an organization with a holding of several hundred PCs.

The average age of a PC is approaching three years, and you think it is time to upgrade the PCs.

However, the chief financial office (CFO) believes that PCs only need to be replaced every five years.

Using the article: Keith Cooke's hard drives were starting to crash and his monitors were beginning to flicker. As manager of IT services at Progress Energy's nuclear division, Mr Cooke last replaced his group's 3,000 personal computers in 1999 in advance of Y2K [a problem arising in date arithmetic in software and hardware in 2000, known popularly as ‘the millennium bug’].

Four years on, the failure rate of those machines had increased fourfold.

So Mr Cooke's company, which serves almost 3m customers in three south-eastern US states, in January replaced the ageing PCs with new machines from IBM. The new PCs run Windows XP, Microsoft's latest operating system, and can thus cope with Progress's weighty but critical enterprise asset management software.

Upgrading PCs was a no-brainer for Mr Cooke.

Applications performance improved by 70 per cent and employees no longer complain about sluggish desktops and notebooks.

And the new machines enabled Mr Cooke's department to cut support and maintenance costs sharply. The investment, he says, will pay off in just one year.