Friday, August 21, 2009

CIO woes

Being the CIO is quite a bit different than being the HPC manager. A couple of months ago I talked about doing a pilot project with an open-source office suite, open-source email. Well, now I'm on the other side of that discussion, and it is especially important since I am in a small (i.e. not multi-billion dollar) corporation. We have about half the company using OpenOffice and Thunderbird/Lightning for email/calendar. The entire company isn't on one solution, however, so that presents its own challenges. With users on three mail clients (some use Outlook, some use Evolution, and some use T-bird) someone in the IT department needs to keep up with all of that software. Some people use OpenOffice, some use Microsoft Office. Some are only provided with a Linux workstation, others have only a Windows box. Some are on Office 2007, others on Office 2003.

Cleaning house is never fun, but now it's my house and I do need to streamline support costs and make things more efficient. I believe we can get there with a good open source suite. More on that as things unfold.

Speaking of open-source, I read a good book several years ago at the urging of Duncan Child, one of my previous associates, called "Dreaming in Code". It walks through product development of Chandler, a "personal productivity assistant". Version 1.0 is now available, so I downloaded it for my laptop. (Hey, I'm the IT manager, I can do whatever I want.) It looks like it might be useful, but will require more off-line experimenting. Unfortunately, there is no time during working hours to do anything but work. Not a bad thing, just a comment. Well, the clock is ticking, back to work.
Have a great day!
Bill
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. MSFT_AlexTAugust 25, 2009 at 12:01 PM

    Hi Bill,

    First of all, thanks for sharing this post. It is important, like you mentioned, to put yourself in the CIO shoes and understand the perspective from the other side of the discussion.

    With employees running three mail clients and different MS Office versions, it definitely makes sense to want to
    Standardize software image and management: The next step is to standardize the software image to save costs. According to IDC, image management accounts for 20-25 percent of operating system deployment costs, and can cost organizations on average $25-$35 per PC annually.

    There's actually a good amount of info and case studies on the Microsoft Enterprise site regarding Controling IT costs in difficult times. You should check it out.

    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/business-priorities/cost-savings.aspx

    Best regards.
    Alex
    Windows Client Group

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)