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The Client in Chaos
How the client domain became chaotic is not a mystery. The PC was the most disruptive technology that businesses ever had the opportunity to exploit. At first it was a stand-alone device that made typewriters and adding machines redundant. Then it was a connected device that laid waste to the vast population of computer terminals and enabled the building of productive departmental and workgroup applications. Then it accommodated email, delivered access to the Internet and, finally, it morphed into a mobile device as laptops proliferated. And now it is no longer sensible to think in terms of PCs alone as client devices; the PDA and the mobile phone are both becoming delivery points for business applications.
The genesis of client management (CM) problems
Nevertheless, the PC was a “personal computer” once. It ran applications for the sole benefit of its user and the user carried out most of the support tasks, including adding new applications and taking back-ups. Support was required, but often delivered by the person in your group that was the most PC savvy. Central IT management was sometimes excluded from the picture and, often, departmental managers gloried in their sense of ownership and IT independence. Departments and even small workgroups built useful, but non-standard, ad-hoc applications on PC LANs.
It was the difficulty, inefficiency and cost of deploying PCs in this way that made way for the central management of PCs. But it took time to get established. The software industry that served the PC market provided few products to assist in PC management and it was a while before such products emerged. The professional management of the client domain was brought to bear late in the day and, in some cases, has still to be properly introduced.
Client variety and PC TCO
For a time, rapid proliferation made the management of PCs less onerous than it might have been. Businesses quickly standardized on a single OS and office application set, and PC hardware quickly achieved commodity status with new models differentiating themselves almost solely by a faster processor and improved screen resolutions. Even so, when companies first began to measure the annual Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the PC, about 15 years ago, it was high - _ as much as 5 times the initial PC cost. And it remains high.
Clearly, TCO figures depend critically on what you take into account. It would be possible to arrive at a standard way of calculating TCO if the client domain were static and PCs were replaced on a regular 3, 4 or 5 year cycle, but this has never happened. New influences regularly come to bear to distort the picture and the client itself is no longer so standard.
The client domain has evolved and it continues to evolve. Nowadays it can include standard PCs, power user desktops, laptops, home or remote PCs, tablet PCs, PDAs and smart phones.
The need for a client management maturity model
The client domain presents a major management challenge and one that is on-going. In most organizations:
- It is increasingly diverse with a growing range of devices needing support
- New applications that need client-side support continue to emerge
- For historical reasons, both political and technical, the management of the client domain is often poorly organized and poorly automated
From a cost/benefit perspective, the client domain is complex to understand because it is both a necessary infrastructure and enabling technology. For that reason, some organizations that have made good progress in managing it, do not have a particularly low Total Cost of Ownership. But the usefulness of TCO is questionable anyway (see side bar).
One way of gaining a useful perspective on client management efficiency is to use a well structured maturity model. At one end of the spectrum there are IT sites where client management is fragmented and reactive (i.e., immature) and at the other end, there are sites that are strongly aligned with business needs and well automated (i.e., highly mature).
Significant business benefits naturally emerge as an organization passes from one end of this spectrum to another. However, anyone who is familiar with client management knows that traveling that road involves a great deal more than purchasing appropriate technology and turning it on.
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