TCO and system standardization (part 2 of 4)
May 2 2007
Imagine you own a taxi service where every vehicle was a different year, make and model. How would you implement mandated changes in safety rules? How about the expense of stocking spare parts for all these vehicles, or, worse, of hiring mechanics who could work on all the different engines? If your environment consists of multiple hardware configurations, operating systems, software packages, software versions and configurations, you're in a similar fix. Streamlining these systems can greatly reduce overhead and drastically boost performance and productivity. The key is to keep it simple.
Software: Standardizing the operating system and common applications increases return on investment (ROI) for the average business owner. Advantages include lower overall training expenses, tighter integration and compatibility, higher productivity, reduced troubleshooting and support, easier license tracking, and potential economies of scale (usually purchasing five or more copies does the trick).
One of the greatest advantages of standardizing business software lies in dealing with upgrades and patches. Software companies constantly churn out new versions, and, with old versions becoming obsolete, we are periodically "forced" to upgrade. When an office is standardized, it is much easier to test, modify and roll out these new versions or patch and update as needed.
Hardware: We touched on hardware in our last article about managing system lifecycles. In a perfect world, every user would work on new and identical machines with user productivity up and support costs down. Old hardware systems drag down productivity in three ways: they are slower, they are more prone to failures, and different configurations behave differently, causing any of a number of problems.
Support: In most office environments, support takes up the lion's share of the information technology budget. Whatever we can do to lower troubleshooting and support costs will go a long way toward optimizing ROI. Standardizing your IT support from a single source contributes to this by increasing accountability, consistency, and economies of scale (through deals like support contracts or buying in volume).
Final thoughts: If you have the opportunity to "clean house" and standardize everyone on the same systems, do it! Sometimes this decision is easy, especially when the majority of your systems are ready to be retired or upgraded. Often, however, the notion is harder to stomach. If your network looks like a patchwork quilt but you're not quite ready to start over, you can still take some measures to improve ROI. Whenever possible, limit the differences among work stations as much as possible in terms of vendors, models, processors and versions of operating systems.