Funny thing.
When distributed applications got started they were so expensive and difficult to install that we would configure each PC individually application by application. The highly connected always networked worker didn’t exist and so data sharing was not really an issue.
Next came the highly networked PC. Enterprise customers signed massive agreements with vendors to cover all of their PC computers with the same basic suites of desktop collaboration tools and relied on email to share and manage information primarily in the form of attached documents. Network drives, and document sharing sites became huge document dumping grounds. It was perceived as cheaper to give everyone the same package “just in case” they might need to view a document or provide a minor tweak. The vision was everyone would suddenly become a knowledge worker ….
Flash forward to today. Now we have networks everywhere. No longer do we want to be constrained to our PC software. It limits when and where we work. It ties us to a device and the location of that device. Today we want our workforce to work from home, the office, the road, the coffee shop…. anywhere. And, we have extreme cost pressures. No longer can we justify blanket Enterprise Agreements where we give every last worker access to the most powerful desktop software “just in case” they might need to view a document or even make minor updates or comments. There will always be those users who need the power of a desktop application to do complex analysis, but in a workforce where we recognize their are different user profiles we can target those power users with the complex applications they need (and allow them to self provision them, or even “rent” them) while the rest of the user base uses cheaper tools with built in viewers and better collaboration from any device. The idea of homogenous IT environments is over.
So, it is time we started collecting real data about our usage patterns. We need to understand how our users access applications and we need to allow “rental” models for complex software packages. We need to provide lower cost web based systems to our work force to collaborate anywhere, anytime. It is time to end the desktop software ELA.
Posted via email from InFormalBrain
