To replace or not, that IS the question
Most organisations base the replacement on Personal Computer hardware on age, whilst not the ideal place to be its a start and ensures continual investment.
Heres my Journey….
6 years ago, here at Nottingham Trent University, after 4 years of use a Student facing computer would be replace. This 4 year old computer would then be assigned to an Academic and after 3 years of use it would finally be allocated to Professional Services. Not idea, although to be honest not acceptable at all.
Our first step was to define, agree and finance a sustainable model with as much information as possible. This was easier said than done as we had no clear purchasing model and no central record of asset. It back to basics time..
So, firstly we had to ensure that we knew what equipment we had, this meant a today up of Active Directory and SCCM and a physical tag and count. Once we got AD and the count to match we knew where we were. We also had to tighten up our provision and retirement processes.
That was the easy bit done.
Now it was time to start some modelling and financial reconciliation to see how affordable it was. We worked up a plan (which I can share, just email me) to spend circa £1m pa for the next 3 years and then reduce this to circa £500k pa. After a fair bit of negotiation we got this proposal through our financial planning program.
We have had this plan in place for the past 4 years and it appears to be going very well, but it is still based on age of equipment. I needed a way to take this rather crude system in place to the next level.
This is where our friends at Software2 stepped in to help. They were just about to launch distribution of NexThink, marketed as an End-User IT Analytics tool.
I was a little sceptical at first as yet another Analytics tool could just add to the big data deluge we are already suffering with. Their pitch is around compliance, security and service delivery, which sounds interesting but not quite the “burning platform” I needed. I then had a eureka moment, what of we could use NexThink to define our computer replacement program. What if, instead of using time to define replacement we used real data analysis of the suitability of the computer for the job in hand. Using this tool we could actually see if the processor was fast enough, if it had sufficient memory, even if elements were about to fail. The game changer I needed.
With the help of Software2 and NexThink we created a Proof of Concept which quickly convinced me that this was what I had been waiting for. Now all I have to do is convince everyone else.
We are just about to start rolling this out for all computers so look here later for how well its gone…
We already had a relationship with Software2 who helped us deliver a very successful Application Virtualisation service (www.software2.co.uk) which I will cover in a separate blog post.