Before you can set out on any journey, you need to know where you are now. End-user computing (EUC) is no different, but if we look closely at EUC for most IT organizations it is not a happy picture. IT organizations often feel assailed from every direction, facing conflicting demands that leave them caught between a rock and a hard place. Users complain, business is dissatisfied and corporate leadership regards EUC as a cost of doing business, instead of a collection of assets that deliver demonstrable benefit. It’s hard to feel good about EUC when it seems that nobody’s happy.
The problem is that IT finds itself trapped in a vicious spiral of four high-level forces: budget, compliance, business and users.
If you include all the devices, the operating systems (OSs), the applications, the tools to manage them all plus all the related labor overhead, EUC typically consumes somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of the total IT budget. That’s a significant burden and most of this cost is operational – consumed in the maintenance, operation and support of existing assets. This is money spent to stand still, not to deploy new capabilities or boost productivity – no wonder EUC is seen as a cost.
Worse still, any projects to deploy new capabilities are usually big – consuming many resources and affecting large parts of the workforce. Such projects are usually embedded in the general process of upgrade and renewal, such as OS migration or hardware refresh. Given the integrated nature of most EUC capabilities, this makes it hard to distinguish the results of the new capabilities from the general re-investment to renew. The result is a perception of near zero marginal benefits: money spent on EUC is not expected to deliver a return. Of course, this means that the general intention of most organizations is to try to spend less on EUC. Unless you work in a very fortunate organization, the likelihood is that your budget for EUC is falling and already targeted for further reductions.
The next major force is compliance. EUC devices and software are typically full of security vulnerabilities that IT organizations struggle to plug through a series of “wise after the event” moves. That’s not a criticism – you can’t plan in advance to protect against risks you can’t perceive. This year has brought a series of new illustrations with well-publicized security breaches, and the rise of a new phenomenon – “hactivism”. Unfortunately, we all have raised expectations of transparency now: if your customers private data is compromised then the chances are somebody will find out and publicize it. Reputational and brand erosion can follow, perhaps even legal action for negligence. The risks are very real and growing.
So if we are spending less and the risks are growing, then the risk per dollar spent in EUC are growing even faster. That’s a bad equation whichever way you look at it, so the natural reaction of most organizations is to standardize and lock down. With the traditional EUC mentality and approach, this is the only way to manage those risks.
For most organizations, this brings EUC directly into conflict with the needs of the business. A standardized and locked-down desktop environment is much harder to change and any change made affects a high number of users, perhaps even all users. This makes it far more complex and costly for organizations to complete mergers and acquisitions, to open new offices or even deals with routine workforce turnover and growth. EUC defines the technology footprint of the workforce, so an inflexible approach makes the business less scalable, elastic and agile. The one constant in business is change, so no wonder business users are often dissatisfied. Their natural response is to minimize – if it feels like every user is carrying a 10 ton weight of technology, then why not reduce their burden.
Of course this means giving each user less and so runs diametrically opposed to the trend in user expectations. The power of consumerization is real and, for most organizations, cannot be ignored. Many users have come to regard EUC as holding them back: they expect more, not less and often have better capabilities at home. They know how to do better and increasingly flout your controls to ensure they can do so.
This makes IT’s EUC efforts seem even less relevant, which raises the next question – why are we spending so much?
We all need to break out of this vicious spiral before we go round again – before the next big wave of investment.
