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Of the six billion or so people on Earth there is probably no one that exactly matches Mr Average. However, it is still possible to gather the facts and describe what that single person might look like. The same is true of companies.
This report describes the average company and how it makes use of information and communications technology (ICT). It goes on to examine some of the risks companies face through bad practice and the remedial action they should take. It turns out there is quite a lot Average Inc. can do to improve the way it uses technology. By definition, many companies will have worse practices than average. Quocirca hopes they will find the suggestions in this report useful. Conversely, many others will, of course, be above average. Well done to them, but they need to guard against letting standards drop and losing the competitive advantage gained by good use of technology. This report provides a standard for comparison—defining the level that, in 2008 at least, they should endeavour to stay above. Average Inc.’s ICT infrastructure These figures are based on real world research that Quocirca has conducted in the last 12 months and are aggregated from a number of projects. Average Inc. looks like this:
1,500 employees.
A single main office (HQ) with nine branches—four large, and five small, all in the same country.
65% of its staff are IT users (just under 1,000).
The four large branches each have an on-premise server running Windows Server 2003, which is used for email, file and print management.
The smaller branches access central servers housed at HQ over broadband connections.
They make use of a privately owned wide area network based on BT leased lines linking its HQ and four large branches.
The internet is relied on to connect the five small branches (“8 meg” ADSL with 10 or 20 to 1 contention).
There have been issues with network performance and caching software has been installed on branch office and data centre servers to try and improve this.
There is no data encryption for network traffic unless it is built into the application.
Average Inc. has just started to open its supply chain management application to certain external
organisations using a web-enabled interface accessible over the internet, to allow:
Suppliers to check inventory.
Customers to check order status.
PCs in all branches and HQ run a mix of Windows XP and older Microsoft operating systems.
Most IT management is carried out remotely by third-party experts, but local branch office staff are relied on to do their own backups, which, as far as anyone knows, are done to tape and stored onsite at the branch. There is no checking the validity of backups or rehearsing for recovery.
There is no standard for printers, scanners and fax machines and some of the branches and HQ departments have made their own purchases. This has led to a complex mix of products and software that is underutilised and incompatible with each other requiring different consumables.
The company-wide telephone network is based on a traditional PBX system. However, Average Inc. has just started using VoIP to communicate between HQ and the larger branches and there is ad hoc use of other collaboration tools such as IM and web conferencing.
A managed service is in place for spam filtering and there is anti-virus software on all desktops. However, there is no restriction on web access or use of USB devices, writable CDs/DVDs or other storage devices.
Mobile IT is becoming important for Average Inc.—about 20% of its employees now access IT remotely:
15% (including fields sales, management and some others) are issued with laptops.
Internet access in the field is via 3G data cards provided under corporate contract or ad hoc wireless access via commercial hotspots, which is expensed.
10% use handheld devices (subset of the laptop users) that are used primarily for mobile email. There is a mix of BlackBerrys, Microsoft Windows Mobile phones and Symbian/Nokia smartphones, mostly company issued, but a few employees have been allowed to use their own devices.
5% of employees are field service engineers who are supplied with Symbian-based smartphones to log faults and request spare parts. All are company owned.
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