Locking down IT or blocking creativity
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Business, Hardware, Networking on
Is a Windows desktop an expensive and insecure liability that you’d like to get under control, or a flexible and powerful tool that lets your employees work, play and be productive? Martin Banks reported recently on an insurance company who rolled out two whole new overseas offices without leaving the office by shipping out thin clients. You can’t complain about the efficiency for the IT team but I wondered about the difference for the end users. Did they have as much freedom and flexibility - in terms of trying new things or in terms of being allowed the level of personal use people expect (in the UK at least)?
If they can’t, some IT teams might be quite happy, Martin told me. Flexibility and personal use can be” `danger areas’ seen by IT managements, and if they can bring desktops under better management and control, stopping personal use and cutting the risks of virii infestation etc the better they will like it.”
I asked Microsoft the same question a few years ago, in a discussion about the parental controls and user account protection: shouldn’t companies go all the way and only run white-listed applications and only allow access to whitelisted Web sites and block personal devices… The immediate and forceful reply was that this would be missing the point of the desktop, where anything from a relaxing game of solitaire to experimenting with graphics software could unleash the creativity of your staff. And the point of the PC over the dumb terminal or the Web browser as OS is the range of software you can get, the ease with which you can run it and the way that no matter how obscure the way you fancy spending half an hour, someone will have written some software to help you do it.
You can only concentrate for 20 minutes at a time, they used to tell me at school (in the middle of a 45 minute lesson, ironically enough; I did have one lecturer at Oxford who took a five minute break in the middle of a lecture to chat about his kitten on the same principle). Whether it’s relaxing by watching a Star Trek mashup to the tune of White Rabbit on YouTube, losing a hand of Spider Solitaire or spending ten minutes doing your online banking rather than an hour in the queue at the hole in the wall they call a bank branch these days, personal use makes the users happier. Personally, I think if personal use is excessive it’s time for a chat with your manager rather than a visit from the IT team.
The assumption with thin client is that you can’t do that any more. It’s my own assumption usually. But when Aspen talked about the way they’re using thin clients for branch offices at VMWorld today, they had a very different emphasis. Yes, they liked just shipping out thin clients to the office and letting the brokers plug in their keyboards and screens and get on with it without any IT setup time. Yes, they like not having to send technology support out to the office - and not worrying about servers left under the desk in an office that’s not locked until the cleaner goes home.
But a couple of days after they sent the first batch of thin clients out to the office, they had to replace them with Wyse models because they’re better at streaming AV. The brokers need access to the BBC and Bloomberg and videos of CEOs reading out company statements - and YouTube (although it’s not clear if that’s business or pleasure). Aspen supports any USB device the brokers want to plug in from printers to iPods. They chose their current system over Citrix so they could have Vista and XP desktops and a full range of software. After all, the brokers are probably well paid and in demand: tie down their IT system until they’re tripping over it and you’ll lose more money than you save on not sending people out for a desk-side support visit.
That’s good news for the users and thin client obviously works well for Aspen. But it means that picking thin client over a desktop PC might not be the decision you originally thought you’d be making.
-Mary
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