Some organizations spend as much as 40 percent of their IT budget on end-user devices, and it can be a vicious cycle keeping them upgraded. A PC upgrade routine is expensive--plus it fails to give the organization any strategic benefit, argues Jonathan Feldman, IT director for a city in North Carolina. A better approach is to target devices specifically to the services users need, he suggests.

People get attached to their devices and can be quite zealous about holding on to them, however. The way to combat that impulse is by developing a service catalog that presents the various services offered by various devices and the costs associated with the services, Feldman writes in a post at InformationWeek. "The way to cut through the quasi-religious hype and emotional attachment to a certain type of device is to get factual," he writes. "Once IT knows which services will be consumed, it can match those services to the appropriate new device."

Engineers may need fat PCs with a lot of RAM and a hard drive, but data entry workers can probably do just fine with terminals. If employees need $300 PCs, they should be informed that they will also require anti-spyware and anti-virus programs, automatic patching and other software. 

The catalog does not have to be perfect, Feldman says. It can be lightweight and agile. "Hit the first two standard deviations of the services that users will consume and you've handled most of the likely scenarios," he writes. "The best source for the first two standard deviations? Your help desk/service desk manager, naturally. This person knows which provisioning requests are the most common, whether it's for an enterprise app or a lighter weight, off-the-shelf app."

For more:
- see Jonathan Feldman's post at InformationWeek

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