The vicious spiral of end-user computing capabilities (EUC) I described earlier this week is not new and has been developing for a number of years, so what’s different now? The answer is that many organizations are now facing their next big wave of EUC investment: the next Windows operating system (OS) migration and hardware refresh. To complete this, they will need to repackage their applications, revisit their management and security processes and retrain their staff.
Organizations planning a Windows 7 migration have limited time to complete it – because the support for their current desktop OS is set to expire. Through 2013, this migration will probably consume a significant part of their IT budget and resources. Whether they want to or not, these organizations have to re-invest in their EUC capabilities now – so they should do so in a way that helps them to break out of the vicious spiral.
The risk here is that they just redeploy new versions of what they have now. The lifetime of the hardware and operating systems deployed this year and next will probably take them through 2016 – we need to ask some uncomfortable questions about this. How good will these capabilities look then? What about improving worker mobility and collaboration? How will this get them any nearer to exploiting the cloud?
It’s time to start thinking about how we can take advantage of some of the new technology options to start making EUC better. Take a look again at the current desktop paradigm. We have files and folders, inboxes and outboxes – even a trash can. This is not the office of 2011 – it’s an automated version of one from the 1970s. We just don’t work like that any more.
Worse still, the operational overhead of EUC is mainly driven by the devices and the OSs – not by the pieces we really should be focused on: the applications and data that support the processes of business. We are all held back by the “real estate” of EUC, distracted from our real objectives.
To make EUC better, every organization should set itself some serious objectives for the next 4-5 years. They should aim to:
- Refocus on users, applications and data – relegate devices and OSs to a supporting role.
- Make the environment easier and less expensive to run
- Give better support to the business in dealing with the external events in this fast changing world
- Help users to work productively from wherever they need to with as much choice as possible in the equipment they use
- Increase their level of control, auditability and risk management
Lofty goals, maybe – but achievable and necessary: after all, this is not just about technology, it’s about how users work through technology. It is the productivity of every organization’s number one asset: people
Of course, if we could just start again it would be so much easier. With all the knowledge we’ve all learned through 30 years of EUC – and with the benefit of retrospective wisdom – we could easily design a better EUC environment. But designing it isn’t the challenge – it’s getting there from what we have now without disrupting the work and productivity of users.
Every organization has many EUC applications and most of those are still dependent on the predominant desktop OS – Windows. Applications tend to have long lifetimes of use and spawn many interdependencies – both technical and in the business: some applications, particularly those developed in house, play critical roles interconnecting disparate systems or business domains.
For as long as an organizations needs these applications, they will need the desktop OS to support them. A rip and replace approach simply isn’t going to be an option – they will need to replace those OS-dependent applications iteratively over time. This has already begun: newer applications are often server or web-based and the periodic need to migrate OS already encourages a preference for OS and browser-neutral applications wherever possible. However, the process is slow: the cross-over point to a majority of OS/browser-neutral applications will occur in 2012 and it won’t be until 2017 that the OS-specific population drops below 30% (in most asset portfolio approaches, that’s the point at which you can make a business case for accelerated replacement).
All of this means that Windows-based applications (and so the Windows OS) will continue to play a part in our EUC environments for some time to come – probably through the end of this decade and beyond.
