[Sigia-l] Tool standardization (was about visio or not to visio)

[Adrian Howard]

On Thursday, August 14, 2003, at 01:47  am, Listera wrote:

> "Adrian Howard" wrote:
>> Also, it's often not the cheapest product that causes this
>> standardisation - but the cheapest product set. It can be a *really*
>> hard task to convince an IT department that they should buy a Foo
>> application that runs on Bar when Foo and Bar  differ from every other
>> piece of supported software and hardware in the organisation. When you
>> start factoring  in support and maintenance costs the purchasing
>> decision isn't so clear cut.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean. Macs are considered to be much easier to
> support, they certainly last longer than your average PC, they are more
> compatible in heterogeneous networks than PCs, they run practically 
> all of
> the apps that are important, at least in our industry, including the 
> Office
> and stuff from Adobe, Macromedia, etc. All these blanket statements 
> are not
> very useful.

Good grief - I've started one of *those* conversations.  I called 
things Foo and Bar to avoid this ;-)

I love Macs. Using one now. Had one for the last ten years. In the last 
company I worked full time for (where I was technical director amongst 
other things) I was very careful to support Macs and PCs since the 
design staff were a heck of a lot more efficient using the former. This 
was worth the extra cost of supporting multiple platforms.

All I am saying is that in a large organisation it can be hard to 
persuade an IT department to move from a standard hardware/software 
platform. However great a platform is if the other 5000 seats in an 
organisation are running something else it can be a hard sell to get 
any official support for the platform in house. Most support skills are 
platform specific so the IT staff have to be retrained or new staff 
hired. Third party suppliers can get nasty if they see the IT 
department moving away from them. It can potentially cost the IT 
department a lot of time, money and worry so they try and avoid it.

This isn't a Mac vs PC thing. The same problems would occur if your 
introduced a few Wintel boxes into a Mac only organisation.

NOTE: I am *not* saying that this is a good thing. All I am saying is 
that it is a situation that often has to be dealt with.

Adding multiple platforms means changing the way IT support is run in 
an organisation. There are costs (often hidden from the people using 
the platform) involved. IT departments want to avoid the change and the 
cost. Persuading an organisation that the cost will be made up by 
efficiency gains can be a hard sell.

Saying these problems don't or shouldn't happen doesn't make them go 
away.

We now return to your normal IA topics (please ;-)

Adrian