Five things you may not know about your desktop environment

22 Nov 2011

Richard Pegden, director of product marketing at Centrix Software, gives a guided tour, pointing out opportunities for improvements and new efficiencies.

If you are undertaking, or are planning, a review of your desktop estate, then you have the perfect opportunity to see where improvements might be made and efficiencies gained. But how deep should you go?

At Centrix Software, we’ve analysed some 2 million enterprise desktops with our end-user analytics software to date and uncovered some interesting findings along the way. These highlight the value of gathering accurate user intelligence as part of the desktop-review process:

Up to 50% of applications installed across an enterprise desktop estate are simply not used. Most organisations suffer software sprawl – application assets installed but no longer used. These forgotten applications remain part of the desktop infrastructure and cost money to maintain. Software sprawl adds a layer of unnecessary complexity to any desktop transformation project. The only way to combat sprawl is to identify what you have installed, what is being used and what is not, and then rationalise.  Companies that do this find they actually recover budget that can be used to fund their transformation initiatives.

Many laptops are not used outside of the office. A user may think that a laptop is the optimum device for them but it’s likely that their day-to-day productivity is based on accessing corporate applications and services in the office and using a smartphone, and increasingly tablets, when they are on the move. We found one customer who established that 75 percent of their laptops were never used outside of the office. With the higher TCO associated with supporting laptops organisations can incur unnecessary costs quite quickly. Assessing how a user connects to corporate resources and the applications they access will help you determine the most efficient application delivery and device strategy for your user environment: thin client, tablet, PC, and Bring-your-own-device are all alternative options that IT can recommend to the business based on empirical data.

Users don’t wait for IT approval. This is a potential minefield for corporate or regulated environments: the relative ease of accessing software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and using web applications means that users have the ability to circumvent IT. The IT department needs to be more engaged with business requirements and increasing numbers of CIOs and IT departments are adopting approaches to become true service providers rather than infrastructure managers to adapt to the impact of consumerisation of IT. Solutions exist today to help with this transition. 

Users often store passwords in an open document on their desktop. With applications and services being provisioned from multiple sources, the number of passwords a user has to deal with can be considerable. One approach to simplifying the password security issue is to enable central management of multiple IDs through an end-user application and service delivery platform. Instead of having to remember multiple passwords, the user has one password in one ‘workspace’, while an identity authentication layer provides seamless, secure access to services from across the company's infrastructure and external sourcing platforms. The idea is to create a more unified end-user computing environment for the user.  Solutions supporting this approach are being referred to as application and service delivery platforms, IT-as-a-Service and user virtualisation.

Desktop virtualisation requires a different mindset to PC deployment. Moving to a virtual environment is not a case of taking existing applications and dropping them on to a desktop virtualisation platform.  The architecture of a virtual environment is different and approaching it with a device-led mindset can derail projects.  As we move to more service-centric IT and desktop models enabled by virtualisation along with web technologies, the user has to be at the heart of every decision. When planning a virtual environment you should know: What applications users need; how users work; where there are common applications that can be grouped by users; who isn’t a good candidate for virtualisation! Even the most basic information can be insightful – with simple analysis, one customer established that they had 15% less users and devices than they believed. This immediately painted a different picture for their virtualisation planning.

If your desktop planning becomes a user-centric exercise, not only can projects stay on time and on budget, but user satisfaction and long-term business and IT planning will greatly improve.