Can we afford choice?

How often do we find ourselves in conflict? Someone wants something slimmer, lighter or prettier than the standard HP PC.  The argument has been rehearsed for more than ten years and is getting boring.  It's the total life time cost that matters.  Let's not squander our money on being different just for the hell of it.  

Here’s the data to show why standardisation is so much cheaper for the University in terms of total life time cost of running a PC, based on the most recent, very detailed, data from Gartner.

All these numbers are in dollars, but they make the point.

Key assumptions:

·         Desktop costs $972 with monitor

·         All PCs are replaced every four years

·         ‘Managed PC’ means there are tools, processes and policies for centralised management and the users cannot install software or change settings without involvement from IT

·         ‘Unmanaged PC’ means there are little or no management tools and the users can install their own software

Total four year direct cost of running a unmanaged PC: is $8,152 or 8.3 * initial purchase cost

Total four year direct cost of running a managed PC:- $6,896 or 7 * initial purchase cost

Saving per year per user is $296.  On an, estate of 3000 PCs this represents a saving of $888K per year for the organisation.

Gartner also has data for the additional ‘indirect’ costs of the time spent by users fiddling with their own computers in unproductive ways in these two scenarios. (Don’t pretend you haven’t done this!) The numbers are simply boggling then, with estimated total savings per year per user of $2,485 or $7,450,000 for 3000 PCs.

These are based on US labour rates so we’d come out a bit lower.  Nonetheless, the point is made.  We have to pursue the savings when we can, so that we can afford to do things differently for researchers when necessary, as it so often is. 

Please can we have a new home?

We just completed a useful experiment.  For two weeks we tracked the hours spent by my team walking back and forth between the five locations that now house us.   It turns out that we are spending 1.5 FTE staff time, or £80K per year, walking.  No doubt this has consequential health benefits  but the University didn't budget for this.  I'm more concerned about other losses - all the waste effort, missed opportunity and general dysfunction that occurs  when teams can't work naturally together.

We are about to reorganise ourselves with the express aims of breaking down silos, reducing handoffs, improving teamwork, improving the first time fix rate, reducing waste effort and, above all, getting better at innovation and problem solving.  We categorically know that we can't do this without a new, properly designed space in which to operate.

Great meeting today with Estates, turning these ideas into a proper business case for investing in a new open plan environment - one in which people can work fluidly together, choosing where they want to work based on the task at hand.  Spaces need to be designed accordingly,  some being appropriate for quiet concentrated work, others more for project or problem solving teams.  And please can we have some social spaces in which to have the kind of relaxed conversations which make for accidental genius?  Good things happen when people can talk to each other without appointment or agenda.    

What's the value currency in a University?

Why is a University such a confusing place for someone who served their professional apprenticeship in the private sector? It should be easy.  Senior executives are simple creatures aren't they?  They only care about three things: the top line (are we generating revenue?) the bottom line (are we managing costs?), risks (what bad things might happen?). Not in a University it seems. Here no one knows what anything costs, or whether anything is profitable and they certainly don't want to hear bad news.

So what do they care about? Finally it dawns. Knowledge, not money, is the value currency around here.  A university is a knowledge factory, its job to create, share and breed wisdom.  And this isn't a zero sum game either.  We can all have more of it.

What a surprise then, that so many attempts to prioritise one investment over another have ended in dissonance.  How stupid to ask the venture capitalist which project will give the best return when we can't quantify this knowledge currency.

Strangely though, we often witness remarkable consensus.  Many will have the same gut feel that something is a good idea. I guess we are going to have to carry on following these hunches. If the purpose is true, and we have a way to serve it, let's JFDI and hope.

Time to walk tall

As A.A. Milne aptly wrote, 

"When I was one I'd just begun,

When I was two I was nearly new,

When I was three I was hardly me,

When I was four I was not much more,

When I was five I was barely alive,

But now I am six! As clever as clever!

And I think I'll stay six now for ever and ever!"

Our IT Services is now six years old and it's time to walk tall. 

At the start it was about professionalising, setting up the Project Support Office and the Service Desk, implementing ITIL disciplines, benchmarking costs, building a governance framework…..

Then it was about modernising the infrastructure  so we could run it efficiently, reducing risk, information security policy…...

Now at last, we can become the trusted IT partner we always envisaged, helping the University to create a digital campus in which students and staff can be productive and creative as possible as they learn, teach, do research and run the organisation.  This is going to be a lot more fun.

It was so useful to hear from Gartner this week that this is the common experience of many, and the pace for us hasn't been any more painfully slow than their's.

Do we need Virtual Desktop?

I had assumed a compelling case for Virtual Desktop (VDI) would eventually emerge .  Our 23,000 students and 4000 staff hold dear their 'academic freedoms'.  Even the word 'corporate' has evil connotations.  For us then, the holy grail of platform independence would be particularly seductive.  But a strong case to do more than play with this technology still eludes us.

Which of these is the problem looking for a VDI shaped solution above all others?

1. How will we provide our researchers with their Linux and Mac devices access to corporate applications now and again?  We could use VDI but why over complicate this?  Web access should work fine.

2. How will we provide 7000 distance learning students access to the same software as our campus based students from their personally owned devices?  We could use VDI for some applications but not the ones with complicated licensing restrictions and not the greedy ones.  So if it's not the complete answer, perhaps we should just give them a managed laptop?

3. How can we make it cheaper and greener  to run 1,400 standard PC seats for students on campus? We could use VDI here but why would we?  We already do this very well and extremely efficiently.  Hard to see how this could save us much.

4. How will we provide professional services and senior management staff with access to sensitive  master data when they are working remotely? What's wrong with an encrypted laptop and a VPN?

 

Is there anyone who works with highly sensitive data, has to work on a platform we don't manage and must be able to do so without leaving a local footprint?  I haven't found them yet.

Anthropology of IT

My highlight at this Gartner conference, if I have to pick one, was a talk by anthropologist Genevieve Bell.  She joined Intel fourteen years ago to fill an information void of colossal proportions. Two simple questions were asked of her at interview and have dominated her career ever since:

1) What do women want?

2) What does the rest of the world do with IT?

('Rest of world' means 'not North America' so we assume that Intel felt pretty expert on how American men behave in their natural habitat. )

Her talk was full of delightfully funny and thought provoking observations about what we know, and what we think we know about the way people use gadgets, consume and share information in their lives.  Why do we use the word 'love' about our iPads? Why do small children expect all shiny reflections (including oven doors)  to respond to touch?  Why is it so rare to see a women holding the remote control?  How do we manage different personas in different spheres and what do we feel about the obliteration of boundaries between them?

There it is again...The most important lesson of all in this fast moving game.  Watch.  Observe.  Use objective evidence.  React.  You do not know the answers.  Unlearn as fast as you learn.    

How long for the Windows PC?

Windows XP must be banished by the end of 2013 or dire things will happen.  We are doing well.  We've nearly finished our Windows 7 roll out.  Plenty are behind us on the endless treadmill that Microsoft designed so cleverly for us back in the 90s. And meanwhile, Windows 8 is upon us.

We need Windows now, as we always have, because we depend on applications that won't travel. But Gartner tells us we've passed a tipping point.  In 1996, most organisations needed Windows to run 95% of their applications.  Gradually the ground has shifted and we use more and more software that will run on any OS, often through a browser.  In 2012, the percentage for most organisations dropped below 50% for the first time.   Perhaps the treadmill does have an end? Perhaps we just completed our last major corporate roll out of a new Windows version?

Certainly, the PC is no longer the centre of the Universe. Watch the research academic in action and you'll see her juggling collections of devices, some personally owned, which are simply different ways of reaching information in different contexts and for different purposes.  The Cloud replaces the PC at the heart of this world.  Our job will be to make this easy and make it safe to bring multiple gadgets into play. Perhaps Windows 8 is destined to be just one of the many now - just one more way to run a browser.

Big Data means big opportunity for new MSc programmes

 4.4 million jobs will be created globally but only a third will be filled - easily the most striking prediction to come out of the Gartner Symposium this year.  

14% of the world's economy is now transacted on line.  There are nearly a billion people on Facebook and 5.6 billion mobile devices wondering the planet.  All this creates unimaginable quantities of data.  We are going to need a very large number of highly skilled data scientists to find the value in all of this, to help work out the next generation of business models that will change the world.  And, human nature being what it is, we'll need nearly as many security experts to help us do this safely and wisely.

My guess is that we should start selling MSc shovels to these gold miners.   

Everyone needs a Mobile App

History repeats.  Do you remember when everyone needed a Web site but few knew why?  They  knew they had to catch the bus but had neither the time nor the imagination to conceive fully of the destination. They recruited a 'Web Master' who could write HTML and throw up the first web presence.  Doesn't that title sound anachronistic now? Now we know that the Web is for everyone and every purpose.    How utterly game changing the destination turned out to be. 

We are in the same place with mobile apps.  We proudly launched our first app last week.  It’s great to see it there in the App Store.  Great too to see the tweets from students telling us that the 'find a PC on campus' feature is really handy.  Now I'm wondering if we need to recruit an 'App Master' or two to galvanise us towards the next stage.  At least I know I don't know where this particular bus is heading.