IT

Corporate IT has had me scratching my head for years. For some odd reason it seems that just about everywhere I look corporate IT is fumbling and dropping the ball, leading to the obvious question of why is it so difficult to implement a rational and functional IT setup in an organization. There are so many dimensions to this, but if we scope the discussion to a tool perspective and put the end-user in the center, we can try to paint some type of a picture.

The common thing about all of the jobs I've ever held is that my main tool is my computer, which in my case has always been a laptop. A common policy in organizations is typically that the computer can be replaced once every three years (some more enlightened organizations may even allow cycles of only two years). But somehow it is not at all uncommon for organizations to provide their employees with laptops which are the cheapest money can buy. Or actually not. For instance I recently received a new laptop from work, which is an HP ProBook 4320s. It weighs very much, sports a relatively sluggish processor, a relatively bad battery life and worst of all it freezes more often than not. Apparently it costs somewhere in the region of 500 euros, give or take a bit. My personal preference at the moment is the new 13" MacBook Air, which I bought recently for about 1200 euros. Assuming that the machine is held for the typical three years, that means an extra cost of 233 euros per year, or about 19.44 euros per month. Of course that may sound a lot for the bean counters, but the device is better in every way I can measure: it is lighter, it is more powerful, it has a better resolution, it has an SSD drive (=it boots up faster, loads programs faster, ...), it has better battery life, it has OS X, and so on.

If we look at the boot up times, the MacBook Air boots up in, oh, 15 seconds. The HP boots up and runs through all of the associated startup procedures to get the system working in 3-5 minutes or so. Assume I work on 21 days in a month, with 3 minutes that's 63 minutes of boot time per month, with 5 minutes that's 105 minutes. With 15 seconds that's 5.25 minutes. So even with the low end estimate of 63 minutes for boot ups per month, if I cost more than 19.44 euros per hour or more to my employer, the rational option would be to go for the MBA. In fact, I would gladly pay 20e per month to my employer to be able to opt for an MBA over the HP.

The argument against high-specced machines has traditionally been that the average employee does not need the high specs because they only need to be able to use basic MS Office tools and such. But even in that case, it would be much more rational to look at e.g. netbooks or these days the new Chromebook-type computers. Acer's Chromebook is selling for about 300 USD, meaning that it significantly reduces the price when compared to the HP I was given. And I will venture a guess that that is a better machine than the HP. Of course in the Chromebook's case one could argue that it is more limited in functionality than a full-fledged PC. I haven't used one so I don't know, but I do know that the laptops leased by the NGO I'm working with are locked down so strictly that it is impossible for employees to install anything on them. And in that respect I think the Chromebooks would be more than comparable.

Now, the big question is why this sort of stuff is still going on in IT organizations and it's nearly 2012. This is just one part of the bigger puzzle of WTF. Other parts include "Why the heck is someone paying large amounts of money for email systems that don't work when GMail is free?"