The challenge
In today’ business world, both IT decision makers and executives are being forced to justify any investments that they make, especially technology upgrades. To ensure that they are not left out of the business management process, IT managers will have to learn how to communicate and justify their IT strategies in business value terms.
By identifying common business challenges that our customers face, we can better focus our business value proposition and concentrate on how Windows XP Professional can add value.
Windows XP incorporates years of customer feedback on Windows 2000, Windows NT, and
Windows 9x and addresses the following key customer issues:

Increasing the productivity of employees

Reducing the cost of managing an IT infrastructure

Streamlining business processes

Communicating with customers and business partners
Increasing the productivity of employees
The productivity of employees can be increased by making it easier to access information, work with programs more efficiently and more quickly accomplish tasks. If each individual can work more efficiently, they will contribute collectively to making the overall company more efficient.
People become more efficient by accomplishing more tasks in less time, generating higher quality output, and by deriving more satisfaction from the work they are doing.
Windows XP Professional helps organizations to increase the productivity of employees in several key ways:

Fresh visual design - common tasks have been consolidated and simplified, and new visual cues have been added to help users navigate their computers more easily. A cleaner work environment also allows the user to be more efficient and users can find the crucial data and applications they need quickly and easily. All of these settings can be controlled via policy, so IT administrators can decide what features are most appropriate for their environments.

Increased mobility - using a laptop computer in the office and on the road is much easier with Windows XP. Remote access to your PC and all of your data and applications, enhanced support for offline files and folders, and support for new hardware power management features revolutionizes the way that users work remotely.

Simplified networking - connecting PCs to the corporate network is much easier with
Windows XP. New administrative tools and support for the latest wireless network technologies let you use 802.1x wireless networks easily and securely.

Global support - the Multilingual User Interface add-on pack for Windows XP Professional lets you install and support a single version of the operating system, rather than one for each of the languages your employees may speak. This makes it easier to deploy business solutions worldwide.

Help and support - users can quickly and easily find the answers they need, reducing help desk calls and increasing user satisfaction.

Enhanced recovery tools - System Restore enables users and administrators to restore a computer to a previous working state without losing data.

Reducing the cost of managing an IT infrastructure
New management tools let network administrators streamline operations to increase efficiency and productivity throughout an organization. The resulting desktops are easier to use, more responsive to change, and better adapted to the way users need to work. It also lets employees increase productivity with less technical support.
Windows XP Professional helps organizations to reduce the cost of doing business in several key ways:

Centralized administration – Group Policy and IntelliMirror technologies allow system administrators to automatically configure each user's computer so that they can log on to any company desktop, anywhere in the world, and work with their personal settings and information.

Better planning – RSoP allows administrators to see the effect of Group Policy on a targeted group of users or computers before making changes.

Enhanced deployment tools - reduces the time it takes to roll-out a typical desktop system and making it easier, more efficient, and less expensive to conduct large scale deployments.

Remote assistance - reduces the amount of time system administrators spend at users' desks. Many administrative and troubleshooting tasks can now be done from the administrators' own desks.

Enhanced application compatibility - users or IT administrators can specify if an application needs to run in either Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 95/98 or Windows Me compatibility mode. In this mode, Windows XP Professional system DLLs provide appropriate responses to the running application, allowing it to execute appropriately without a noticeable loss of performance.

User state migration - h elps administrators to migrate a user’s data and application/operating system settings from an old computer to a new Windows XP
Professional desktop computer.
Streamlining Business Processes
To be competitive companies need to adapt both internal and external business processes quickly. For example, businesses need to create a rapid flow of up-to-date information among employees, customers, and partners. This can help a company spot trends and act on them quickly. And a business with efficient business processes can form closer, more efficient relationships with customers and partners.
Windows XP Professional helps organizations to streamline business processes in several key ways:

Reliable systems - today's businesses must be open around the clock and around the world, while still protecting private corporate information. Critical business processes such as online inventory fulfillment or order processing require a reliable, fast and secure operating system.

Scalable performance - desktop users benefit from large memory and dual-processor support, which allows them to perform such demanding tasks as engineering, design, and mathematical operations.

Centralized administration - Windows XP provides powerful management tools to help ensure business policies and processes are implemented consistently and efficiently.

Build better solutions, faster – support for leading-edge Internet standards such as XML lets developers quickly and cost-effectively create, refine, and deploy applications.

Communicating with customers and business partners
All companies face the challenge of simplifying communication with their customers, partners and suppliers. In addition, there is the added challenge of getting their own internal systems and employees to talk to each other.
Windows XP Professional helps organizations to communicate and collaborate with customers, suppliers and business partners in several key ways:

Integrate customers and suppliers into your value chain - if you develop or acquire new software, or even acquire entire new companies through a merger, the open standards supported by Windows XP let you integrate new systems with your existing processes.
Likewise, you can more easily and securely integrate third parties into your business and to let them access core systems on a "need-to-know" basis.

Secure information and communications - the end-to-end security of Windows XP lets organizations integrate systems both inside and outside the company, with fewer concerns about security across the network.

Real-time communications – with Windows Messenger you can choose text, voice, or video and experience the best online voice and video quality. Collaborate with contacts, transfer files, and share applications and whiteboard drawings.
Already, major corporations using preview versions of Windows XP Professional – including
British Columbia Ministry of Sustainable Resources, JR East Information Systems, and Oklahoma
Supreme Court say Windows XP Professional will add value, solve key business problems and play an important role in the future of their businesses.