End-User Computing, Managing

 

Background and Scope

 

The number of computer users in an organization has grown from a few finance and personnel people in the 1950s to a very large population. Many organizations now have inventories of personal computers larger than the number of employees, arising from policies where employees are also provided with home and portable computing equipment.


The stand-alone personal computer of the 1980s gave way to those connected to local-area networks designed to share files and printers. These were the early days of end-user computing and at that time it was believed that this was going to end the tyranny of the traditional data center or “glasshouse” IS organization that operated corporate and departmental systems.

 

As computing power is integrated into business processes, it will become increasingly critical to safeguard the integrity of data security and continuity of operations. Since the mid-1990s:

 

·      The ubiquity of end-user computing, the rapid adoption of Internet technologies (Internet access, corporate intranets), the deployment of client–server applications, the adoption of wide-area networks, the use of e-mail, etc. all combined to create a well-connected enterprise.

 

This in turn, presents a problem of scale: It is much simpler to manage a local-area network with 15 personal computers than an enterprise network of several thousand computers.

 

·      There is an added challenge of growing power: UNIX and NT servers now have the level of complexity of the mainframe (Windows NT consists of more lines of code than the IBM mainframe operating system MVS/ESA), running multiple applications on several partitions, but without the management tools available for mainframes.

 

·      End-user computing is now expected to have availability targets no different from those of the traditional data center, i.e. higher than 99.9% (this implies a downtime of less than 9 hours a year), have a very high degree of security, and operate 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

 

·      The accepted average expenditure needed to provide a fully functional, networked, and supported personal computer in 1999 was $10,000 U.S. per year, that is, a visible and substantial cost that continues to rise.

 

It is recognized that the lessons learned in the operations of large networks and large computer systems typical of the glasshouse can and should be applied to the networked environment of end-user computing.

This article focuses on three aspects of end-user computing in a multiuser environment: policies that define the end-user computing environment, processes that enable it to be operated and supported to an appropriate level of service on a continuous basis, and projects through which major changes to infrastructure, hardware, and software are implemented and rolled out to the end-user community.

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