Travelport: bring stubborn
staff under control
Located in Langley, England,
Travelport is a company with 3,500
staff with offices at more than 160 countries, which provides transaction
process for tourism, including many big airlines. With the matter of standard
desktop computer, the company has a rather aggressive opinion of administrative
right, and can staff install specific app?
The company uses Altiris, which is currently owned by Symantec,
to manage standard desktop computer. Veteran engineer Rob Moore
explained that right after staff opened work computer, core operating system
image was updated with some standard apps such as Microsoft Office 2010, Adobe Flash, and Adobe
Visual Communicator.
Requiring app beyond standard is a rather easy process, and
includes calling supportive department to have access to software store
containing hundreds of apps; Moore refused to give the exact number. The
company chooses software that will not cause obstacle for key business app, and
it upgrades to the latest version even when Moore’s group know necessary
supportive process for key apps does not change much. 25 to 30 staff at
supportive department understand approved apps very clearly.
However, because company’s work force is dispersed
throughout many countries, Moore said Travelport limited servers determinedly than most
companies. User can request an original app such as Google Chrome,
but it will not become a part of core. He said thanks to reasonable
organization of standard desktop computer, bad installations were extremely
rare. To add software, final user will have to re-build the computer at first.
This is the lesson Moore learnt: maintain a core standard
desktop computer independent from hardware, although you develop standard
images for departments only. There may be some changes, but most efficiency
comes from as little deviation as possible.
Advocate Health
Care: a big enterprise
For small companies, standard desktop computer is easier to
develop, and processes are often easier to manage. But for big companies, all
changes for standard images and key apps become confused so fast.
That is the reason why there is no surprise that in all
companies interviewed for this article, Advocate
Health Care firm having head office
in Chicago is using the oldest app in its standard desktop computer. A 30,000
staff-company which serves for Illinois centre still uses Windows XP SP2 and Internet Explorer 7 in standard image, mainly because IE8 will cause
problem for a group of sole business apps used at branch offices.
‘It is a difficult procedure because we want to update but
we cannot use an operating system or a browser damaging our business unit just
to get update,’ said Dan Lutter, Advocate’s technology services manager.
Choosing time may be inappropriate for staff supporting Advocate to process new
apps because they still solve problem with current installations, and maybe the
new version is not checked completely the security bugs.
Lutter
explained a new script in which user begins to request IT department to make
Mozilla Firefox available as a part of standard desktop computer. Finally, he decided to object.
In fact, the company has not ever checked Firefox since it is not suitable time
to process incompatibility.
‘When key business apps work inappropriately, it is lost of
efficiency. More regular calls to supportive department for support service’s
staff to join and uninstall apps confuse customers. We do not hope to have apps
on standard desktop computer that make customers have unsatisfactory business
experience,’ explained he.
Advocate uses LANDesk Management Suite to manage standard
desktop computer and software store. Lutter said an advantage of using this
tool is that his group receives warning when someone is trying to install bad
app. He said that Advocate has spent 7
years to fine-tune standard desktop
computer’s procedure, and a new lesson they learnt here is reduction of core
standards. Currently, there is one standard for all laptops, one for desktop
computer, and one for tablet.
‘Essential effort in planning, checking, and migrating
(operating system and apps) is worse when you talk about a very big
environment, so there is nothing unusual to see old systems in big companies
when IT staff’s time is so precious,’ judged Boyle.
Finally, although using standard desktop computer help save
IT’s time and effort, remove bad installations, or improve general security,
all companies have to develop specific standards to meet staff’s needs. As
SecurityCurve’s Boyle noted,
in cloud and mobile device era, standard desktop computer is more important
than ever, especially if the objective is better IT’s efficiency.
