16 Oct 2007 dmarti   » (Master)

How to risk-shift the desktop productivity suck

The Bring Your Own Laptop movement makes Nick Carr's blog.

BYOL is the IT side of The Great Risk Shift. Just as companies have moved employees from "defined benefit" pension plans to "defined contribution" plans, it makes sense to offload the risks of desktop PCs from the company to the user. Today's desktops are the worst of both worlds: they're as flaky as an innovative product, with all the differentiating value of a commodity product. It's a no-brainer for the CIO to disconnect his or her performance from the Great Desktop Productivity Suck. And no, the problems of desktop machines aren't vendor-specific.

Instead of making a capital investment in no-value-add PCs and the payroll expense for a desktop support desk, the IT organization is starting to consolidate behind the defensible wall of the server room, just as Maréchal Vauban advised King Louis XIII of France to abandon indefensible territory and concentrate on the fortresses that could give each other defensive support.

When a company provides web-based access to a corporate application or remote desktop access to a preconfigured desktop image, all the unpredictable support burden of real hardware: the driver conflicts, "DLL Hell", and updates for system software, falls on the user and his or her spouse, not on the company.

The IT department no longer has a monopoly over delivering information services to the employees. Instead of petitioning the IT organization for something, the marketing department can go use SurveyMonkey, the development organization can get a hosted GForge instance, and everybody can use PBwiki. In-house IT is in the same position "selling" to employee users as the local Radio Shack store is with electronics shoppers. In that kind of competitive situation, a company—and an IT department has to manage itself like a company—can't afford to sink time into a cost center like cleaning up the desktop mess.

Prof. Carr usually concentrates on the advantages of cleaning up the server room and outsourcing more of the back end, but the client is where the biggest potential gains are.

Of course, old-school petty dictator IT types will squawk about needing to control the client, but come on, dude, face reality: the client is no man's land. You, the user, Microsoft, and the Storm worm are fighting for control, and some days you're winning. Best case is your finger stays in the dike for another day. Your impact on the top line: zero. Go home and read the want ads—maybe there's a high school somewhere that needs a vice principal.

Syndicated 2007-10-16 19:04:57 from dmarti's blog

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