Personal vs. Business Computing
After reading Massimo Re Ferre’s comment to one of my earlier postings and listening to Brian Madden’s excellent new webcast on desktop virtualization, I was reminded that I wanted to do an entry on personal vs. business computing. In his comment, Massimo references his own excellent post on employee owned PCs. Ironically, it was Brian who inspired Massimo’s thinking with an earlier post on the topic.
This entry is really about the importance of indentifying and understanding use cases for client computing, a point which Brian drives home in the webcast and something that we focused on heavily in the Flexible Desktop Computing white paper I co-authored at Microsoft. Mike Rose at IDC also covered some of the basics on different user classes in his worldwide VCC forecast earlier this year.
I think use cases are important because our industry has tended to overlook them when it comes to client computing needs and requirements. This seems to be a byproduct of the PC era, which has hailed the traditional desktop and laptop as “Swiss Army-like” computing devices that provide incredible flexibility. And while it's true that rich clients are remarkable machines, the utility they supply is accompanied by substantial cost, especially when it comes to corporate IT trying to deploy and manage them at scale.
Managing corporate desktops has become increasingly challenging in part because very few companies do a good job at really understanding their users’ requirements. This is not a dig on IT; it’s very time consuming to study how someone actually uses their PC and even if you’re successful at it, there’s no guarantee that a business user is going to agree with you or accept reduced functionality that meets their actual (as opposed to theoretical) needs. We (as users) are all too quick to pull out the “I don’t fit into that category” card when someone challenges our self-proclaimed computing requirements.
This typical defensive reaction has gotten worse in the past decade as business and personal computing have become intertwined in new and unforeseen ways. Almost everyone does some personal computing from their business PC (some more than others :^>) and some business computing from their personal computer. However, therein lies the conundrum – the more these two worlds have collided, the more end-user requirements have morphed and expanded. It’s hard enough to divvy up all the different use cases and requirements within the realm of business computing, let alone the personal side.
I think that if companies and IT are ever to get their hands around this problem they must clearly define not only business vs. personal use cases but also the different business computing needs of the users in their organizations. Once these requirements are mapped, IT can start to draw lines and create classes of service that adequately meet the needs of their different user communities. And after that, hopefully they can (with the support of executive management) incent employees to focus on their true business computing needs and stop using corporate IT assets and human capital for personal computing requirements.
Jeff Fisher
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Reader Comments (2)
The themes of this blog entry really resonate with me. I am driving a series of desktop virtualization initiatives at my employer, and we absolutely use the "use case" concept to distinguish between user populations and virtualization techniques. Examples include
1. server based computing and thin clients for branch workers
2. Hosted desktops for developers and Offshore staff augmentation
3. Blade workstations for some power users
and we're looking at streaming options
I sense though that you are extending the use case approach to the most intractable problem we face, the blurring of work and personal life, consumerization of technology, and the coming end user revolt. For those groups we are not currently virtualizing, and thus still using traditional PC approaches, we antagonize them constantly with mandated encryption, policy controls, lockdowns and other necessary imperatives of the enterprise, all of which impact end user choice, application use, and access to their personal digital persona.
I'm intrigued and will keep watching this space for more wisdom.
Mike,
Thanks for you insightful comments. I agree that the personal computing side of this equation is sacred ground from the user’s perspective and that we need to tread carefully when talking about what solutions and tradeoffs will and will not work. I personally think that one way to win this part of the struggle is through an employee-owned laptop program. Let’s face it – users are only going to be willing to give something up if they get something in return. Subsidizing their purchase of a personally owned laptop provides such an incentive and also serves a number of other purposes:
1. It gets a rapidly depreciating asset (in the form of a corporate-owned desktop or laptop) off the company’s balance sheet
2. It avoids issues of duplicate OS licensing when delivering virtual desktops to corporate owned assets that are already licensed for Windows
3. It allows the user to work offline (more on this below)
In most cases, the only thing users really need in a mobile disconnected environment (i.e. airplane, etc.) is access to a cached copy of their mail, Office to read attachments and to create/modify content, and perhaps some other types of common software like Adobe Reader. If the company can provision the email client (the rest of the software is almost always installed on any given machine and normally doesn’t require any special configuration), then the user can be productive offline and once they get reconnected, can access their hosted virtual desktop again to use all their connected applications (which represent the lion share of applications that information workers use, above and beyond email and Office). Of course, there are still some kinks to work out here (i.e. synching of data created/modified offline) and there will always be classes of users who need access to more apps while disconnected, but I think this is a viable solution for the vast majority of corporate users.
Jeff