Bringing users up to speed   An important consideration when planning your strategy for refreshing the IT infrastructure is to ensure the user is fully aware of the changes to their desktop, how it will affect them and how the new technology can help to increase their productivity. By adopting a Communication and Training programme in tandem with the desktop implementation plan, organisations can ensure their users are trained at a critical point – as the desktop is installed. This keeps the users informed, ready to accept the change and able to use the new technology quickly and effectively with minimum downtime. Computacenter, in joint partnership with Spring IT Training, can provide a variety of communication and training solutions, which can be tailored to meet our customers’ business objectives. Many migration programmes are now using highly innovative e-learning solutions in conjuction with customised migration courses. Computacenter offers a range of such courses, which not only educate users on the technology changes, but also consider improvements in business practices and examine new ways of working.

When you want to upgrade your IT infrastructure, advice from an unbiased partner can help you assess your strategy and requirements

If you have made the decision to upgrade your IT infrastructure, you will face a number of practical issues. The first of these is to make the business case for investment to the board, because the sums you will need to set aside for such a project are likely to be substantial. While you may be personally convinced by the arguments for change, most organisations will want to see watertight metrics to demonstrate clearly that such heavy investment will provide a worthwhile return. However, calling in the management consultants is likely to be prohibitively expensive, and the resulting report disappointingly equivocal.

On the other had, if you approach vendors directly to make the case for you, any conclusions they present are likely to have little credibility given their vested interest in recommending that you upgrade. The ‘middle way’, says Computacenter’s Microsoft Business Manager Peter McCartney, is to use a business partner that will, for a reasonable fee, apply a set of independent tools and techniques in a relatively short timeframe to assess the potential value to your organisation of refreshing its infrastructure.

“We call this the Business Value Assessment (BVA) and have done it for a number of customers using independent techniques from the likes of Cranfield, Gartner and IDC,” he says. “It’s a true 360-degree assessment that will clearly show the cost of an infrastructure upgrade with the predicted return on investment over, say, a three-year period. We deliver a short, sharp, pragmatic report showing both the business and technology benefits, which only takes 10-15 days and costs a fraction of what you’d end up paying a management consultancy.”

Quick return

Assuming that your case for an upgrade is accepted by the board, you will then be faced with the challenge of implementing the new infrastructure rapidly in order to ensure that the return on investment can be delivered to the business as quickly as possible. Again, working with a dedicated business partner can help.
“We did some analysis based on real customer scenarios as to the practical challenges businesses face when they decide to upgrade their infrastructure,” explains McCartney. “We then looked at how we could face each of these challenges quickly, with the least risk and at the lowest cost.”
The first point to remember is to prepare for the upgrade carefully. “Once you’ve got the money, it’s tempting to get the CDs out and start running round upgrading desktops – but it’s not as simple as that,” says McCartney. “You have to talk to the business and find out how to produce an infrastructure that will be low cost to manage.” The ideal situation would be to have desktops that you’d never need to touch again until you needed to upgrade the hardware. “The biggest ongoing cost of desktop machines is sending someone to go look at them when they go wrong. So you need to think about such things as how to remotely fix applications, administer patches and so on.”
The next challenge is to perform a detailed, up-to-date audit of your hardware and come up with a list of everything that needs to be renewed or upgraded – laptops as well as desktops. Following this, you should produce a similar audit of your applications. This, says McCartney, is “the biggest challenge – bar none” for most organisations. “Consolidating, testing and packaging applications is the one element that holds up most desktop rollouts,” he says. “Most businesses underestimate how serious the problem can be.” Departments have often installed applications on an ad hoc, as-needed basis and there is generally a lot of room to standardise on off-the-shelf packages. This in itself can drastically reduce future application management headaches – not to mention ongoing licensing costs.

Appropriate infrastructure

Next, you need to ensure that your networking and communications infrastructure is appropriate for supporting the new systems. “You need to ask questions such as whether it will support a Windows XP Active Directory environment, and whether it has adequate remediation and security built in. It’s quite likely you’ll need to upgrade to a certain extent, but I think most organisations expect that,” says McCartney. He adds that you should also bear in mind that the network not only has to support the new infrastructure, but that it also has to support your business during the period of implementation. “In other words, you might need an even faster network to support the co-existence of the old and new systems,” McCartney notes. In order to keep support costs to a minimum, you will also want to standardise the number of desktop and laptop images you need to manage. “Back in 1999, every time a new hardware build came out, the IT support people would generally build a new image containing the operating system, core applications and so on. The number of images you needed to manage often ran into the hundreds, but with the new technologies you simply don’t need all these different images,” says McCartney. “This obviously lowers the cost and significantly improves reliability and manageability.”

A big factor here is application packaging. “Once again, this is something that a lot of organisations don’t realise the impact of. In the past, when a new version of an application such as Acrobat came out, they would build it into a new image. This is the main reason why there has been such a proliferation of images. However, best practice today is to package the application using Microsoft Installer (MSI) technology, so that you can deploy the desktop image separately and simply load the packaged application as required, which is easy to do remotely,” says McCartney.
Another problem you are likely to encounter is that users’ data is badly organised and they may not even know where a lot of it is. Clearly, there will be a need for some form of data consolidation. Again, working with an experienced partner can help you here. McCartney points out that Computacenter offers a number of services in this area.
Once you’ve completed all the preparatory work of auditing your systems, upgrading hardware and communications equipment, standardising images, packaging applications and consolidating data, it is – as McCartney points out: “just a question of turning the handle on the sausage machine”. He adds: “We use a variety of technologies to deploy desktops rapidly and remotely. So if you’ve got a blank machine, we can point a virtual finger at it and within 15 minutes it’ll be running the latest image.”

Rapid solution

Drawing on its experience with customers such as the Greater London Authority and Places for People, Computacenter has now formalised the various elements of upgrading an infrastructure into a solution it calls Rapid Desktop Migration (RDM), which it is currently implementing for several customers.“We say we can justify in days, design in weeks and deploy in minutes,” says McCartney. The advantage to customers of using a third-party service such as this is that they benefit from the combined experience of many previous customers’ deployments and migrations to achieve a low-risk, cost-effective upgrade.

Simon Oecken, Computacenter’s Microsoft practice director, also notes that using an approach like RDM can significantly reduce the problems associated with future upgrades. “The end goal is not just about transforming the state of the desktop, it is also about transforming operations,” he says. “The proof points need to be around better management of the desktop, better security in terms of patch management, better asset management, remote implementation and support, and so on. I think that provided customers look at the whole picture now, future upgrades should be far less painful. The more you can automate system management, the easier it will be to monitor, amend and upgrade systems on an ongoing basis. And I do see that a lot of larger organisations are now thinking very seriously about these issues.”
One customer set about migrating systems from around 15 disparate offices into a single campus location. In 2002, Computacenter won a bid to manage the company’s migration to a new XP environment in the new campus. The other initial main driver for the project was that the firm is a heavy SAP user, and SAP was withdrawing support for NT. However, the company soon found that there were plenty of significant benefits to be had from making the move.

Angus McNab, Computacenter’s Microsoft partner director, explains: “Because of the ad hoc way the systems had originally developed, the customer had a poorly managed NT infrastructure and was seeing a lot of blue screens. Boot-up times were as much as 10 minutes, and the company wasn’t able to say precisely what was running in the environment and simply could not manage its IT estate efficiently.” Computacenter was responsible for managing the entire programme to upgrade and move the company’s IT infrastructure. “That didn’t just mean the Windows estate – we also did the cabling, networking, the Active Directory design, the desktop design, and implemented print and document integration services for them,” says McNab.

Speed was key to the project, since they only had 12 weeks to move the first batch of users into the new campus building, so Computacenter designed and built the new infrastructure in its own Solutions Centre. But the customer soon began to see the other benefits of the migration.“They saw big business benefits. We were able to bring them a standard set of applications with licenses they could manage. We consolidated their servers down from around 130 to just 26. Now they are able to make changes to systems readily, as and when the business requires. Now if they want to do something they can test it, run it, check it, and can forecast what the costs are going to be,” says McNab. Indeed, the migration has been so successful that the company is now planning to use the UK system as the benchmark for its entire European operations.

The key to success, thinks Oecken, is joined-up thinking. “The more you can design such infrastructure refreshments from the outset with a managed service operation in mind, the more benefits the customer is going to see. If people are viewing it as simply being time to change their desktop then they’re not really seeing the big picture and they certainly aren’t looking at the highly significant business benefits they can achieve.

Simon Oecken
Computacenter’s Microsoft Practice Director