Friday, June 10, 2005

Product or Process?

Wow… Another week runs by. Just when you get used to the daily grind and you don’t think it can get busier… Well it does. My current employers a medium sized organization, which has grown rapidly, through both acquisitions and business growth.

They are currently struggling with the operational and managerial framework that is required to shift from a small time IT environment to a large scale enterprise environment. Progress is made, however there is still a lot of room for growth.

Topics such as desktop administration, asset management, domain administration, delegation, and locked down workstations, licensing controls, SOX Compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley), and others are coming to the forefront in additional to the daily tasks that have already existed in the organization.

One of the current realizations this organization is undergoing is that of, Product vs. Process. Most small and some medium sized companies are able to solve problems with a single item called a product, you have a need for a service or function you buy a product install it and then use said product.

Many larger organizations have already realized that you often need to replace the word product with process. Desktop administration is a process. This process can be made easier with a number of products, but the larger the organization the harder it is to find a product to single handedly resolve the pain in an area.

The following products are some that are viewed as solution by some medium and larger organizations when they also should be looking at the process that needs to be wrapped around those products.

Desktop Deployment
Managed and Locked Down Workstations
SMS 2003
Patch Management

You can find many products, which will advertise they can solve the pain points associated with these areas of IT management, however, if they are not wrapped in a solid process the root problem will only be marginally mitigated or only covered up to rear its ugly head again later. (At the much greater expense)

If you have installed products and they are largely underused, misunderstood or failing in the implementation it may not be the product itself (although it could be) it may be a failure in the process surrounding the product or the lack of any coherent process in the first place.

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