The first phase of the journey to better end-user computing (EUC) comprises five steps:
- Since this is a journey, organizations must begin by ensuring they understand what they have now and how they expect their requirements to change – this will highlight where and how the repackaging options can best be applied to deliver value (and cost savings).
vv - The first area to focus on is applications – to prepare for the OS migration. Each organization should aim to virtualize as many as they can. They should also ensure they establish (and communicate) “rules” for what new applications look like. It won’t help on the journey if IT is reducing the application inertia, while business users are simultaneously creating more elsewhere.
vv - The review of the application portfolio will highlight many opportunities to rationalize and simplify desktop software loads. Duplicate versions of applications and any that aren’t needed should be eliminated. This is also the time to begin piloting (server-hosted) virtual desktops for the most rationalized image builds.
- Organizations upgrading their desktop OS should now begin the migration. For the users they intend to support through virtual desktops, they should synchronize the roll-out of the two projects.
vv - The last step in this phase is to take stock of local and federated user requirements – where applications or drivers for specific peripherals need to be installed by local administrators or even the users themselves. Desktop personas should be exploited to extend the virtual desktop deployment to as many users as possible.
At the end of this phase, IT will have simplified your application payload for all users and the platform delivery for some desktop users. They will also have gained device independence for the virtual desktop users.
The first of these steps – understanding what EUC capabilities the organization has now and will need in the future – may sound trivial, but it’s not. This understanding is critical for defining the language and structure of the journey that follows.
Any journey comprises three main components: a start point, an end point and some steps in the middle. Describing the start and end points is essential for planning, but our language for doing so is weak because the traditional definitions of user profiles are outdated. “Knowledge workers” are often most of the workforce and if the objective is to match technology to user requirements then calling someone a “power user” is not very helpful.
To define EUC requirements more objectively, we need to think about what users need in business terms: where will they work and how will they move? How much control they can/should be given them over the applications and data they use? What applications do they need? Who else do they need to work with and how? We will need to do this for both future and current requirements – to define the start and end points.
Our understanding of the start point may not be as complete as we want. For the last 15 years, PC management best practice has been to maximize standardization – this offered the most guarantees of ensuring applications would work and the best way to reduce operational costs. But the push for standardization and predictability also created a drive to equip every user with the same device and software load. It established a “one size fits all” mentality that is both inefficient (when everyone gets the same size, no one gets the right size) and a barrier to change.
As a result of the one-size-fits all approach, very few organizations now have a complete view of where users are over-equipped (whereas users tend to shout out if they don’t have enough). We need to understand this before we can fully identify the deficiencies in what we have now and the opportunities for cost savings.
When planning the end point, we must also make sure we consider what the organization really needs: How much more elasticity do we need in the operational footprint of the workforce to support business growth or transformation objectives? What kind of baselines should be set for performance, availability and security?
