Adventures in home working

Delivered by Steve Maytum – VP – End user platforms

1. Today
1. 54,000 managed XP desktop, two builds.  Modified the Gina to add a “borrow” button to RDP to a CPS environment or RDP to the users desktop PC,  this is similar to what CSC have done, but my modifying the GINA they have a solution that doesn’t force a locked session to logoff – nice!
2. 15,000 managed laptops
3. 4,500 applications
2. Investing in
1. 50 unmanaged PCs
2. 300 thin client devices
3. 3,200 virtual workstations
4. 700 seamless published applications, 4,500 concurrent users
5. 70 streamed apps
6. Lots of Blackberries
3. Investment banking is all about agility and power and speed of delivery, 140 changes a week
4. Private banking is about protection of data and stability, 2 big changes a year
5. Drivers
1. Cost reduction
2. Strategic sourcing
3. Increasing remote offices
4. Mobile and nomadic users
5. Home working
6. Availability of power and heat, green – in some building they are not able to deliver any more power to the buildings
7. Business continuity
8. Regulatory requirements
9. What their peers are doing
10. Consumer experience & user capability is driving a need to raise the bar
11. Increase in technology capability
6. Remote access security framework
1. A NAC check provides control over what you have access to, using an SSL VPN –
2. EPA Factory is used for the end point analysis
1. Service pack
2. AV running and have a signature that’s less than 2 weeks old
3. Personal firewall running
4. New version being developed to provide information on geographical location, whether they are at the PC console or remoting to it, checking for password protected screen savers
3. Pass
1. Access to your PC via RDP
2. Local printing
3. Line of business apps
4. Long inactivity timer
4. Fail
1. Just access to email and office apps, plus a softphone
2. Short inactivity timer
5. Citrix Access Gateway – Advanced Edition sits behind an SSL VPN
6. RSA SecureID
7. Citrix web interface used
8. Most users just use Citrix to provide access to their existing desktop PCs using RDP tunnelled through ICA
9. They have lots of users apparently who bring in their personal laptops and rdp to their desktops
7. Success so far
1. 8,738 user connections a day
2. After 6PM 1.26 years of work gets done every night
3. At the weekend 3.33 years or work gets done
4. Total of 500 years of productivity
5. Peak usage is 9PM and 7000 users on a sunday
6. Number 1 requested service
8. End state
1. Citrix PS desktop – 112 sessions per blade
2. VDI desktop – 40 desktops per HP C Class blade
3. Trader private blades
4. SoftGrid for application streaming
5. IGEL thin clients
6. Traditional PCs with app streaming
7. Thin offices
8. Remote users
9. Considering putting all the clients on a “dirty” network and do all client – data centre access over an SSL VPN
9. Interesting point that I’ve made myself many times
1. yesterday – business demand outstripped technology opportunity
2. now – technology opportunity has exploded, way beyond business demand or even businesses availability to keep up

This looks like an excellent group for people like me, working within a large enterprise, providing advice and solutions to large enterprises and trying to manage the disruptive enterprise 2.0, web 2.0 disruptive wave of change – while keeping our business and their’s running and profitable.

The mandate of the group:

The goal is to have a private forum for people inside companies to join virtual forces in driving Enterprise 2.0 into the mainstream. What makes this group different is that we will work to bring in experts to answer key topics and foster conversation. It is not a passive community.

I’ve spent the last 20 years working on end user infrastructure and I’ve discovered a lot of Microsoft Access databases, but this is hard to believe:

CMS Watch says its clients include a North American bank that found “more than 5,000 uncontrolled and unaudited instances of SharePoint,” and a major energy company that “reported finding more than 15,000 previously undetected instances of SharePoint.”

For a long time now I’ve watched Jeffrey Snover and admired his passion, Graham noticed as well and linked to this short video that explains some of what motivates Jeffrey.  As Graham points out the all important ingredient is that Jeffrey really believes that PowerShell is going to improve the lives of IT administrators everywhere and I think he’s right.

This sort of passion drives me as well – at least it does when I’m convinced that the technology and process innovations I’m working on with CSC are really going to makes peoples lives more productive and fun.  That’s not always the case of course sometimes the enterprise agenda and the end users agenda are not perfectly aligned, but whenever possible I’m trying to find ways to make what we do a “win win” for CSC, our customers and our users.

This blog reflects my focus on the end user more than my other work in CSC but I’m never more enthusiastic about work than when I think there’s a chance to help people.  Right now though I’m worrying about a few things:

1. Is ever more technology in our lives really making life better
2. Is always on communication disrupting our work life balance
3. Is addiction to email, social networks, computer games, eBay etc going to be as damaging as other forms of addiction
4. Is mobile working really more productive
5. Are constant interruptions making us dumb
6. Do we really need to keep on top of all this information that’s flowing our way so efficiently
7. What’s the long term effect of virtual work and play on our mental health and the quality of our relationships
8. Do end users need protecting from themselves
9. etc

In all of the examples above,  I think the answer turns out to be “it depends” and its part of my job to help reduce the level of uncertainty in the answer.

I had a good laugh at this article in Wired where Seth describes how the search for increased productivity can easily become a goal in itself, in fact dwarfing actually doing real work.  This snip tells it all:

When my fiance came home from work each evening, we’d ask each other how our respective days had gone. She’d describe the small frustrations and victories that punctuate office life. I’d say something along the lines of “Today I spent three and a half hours organizing my Google Bookmarks” or “You’d be amazed at what you can turn up if you play around with Google US Government Search.” Then we’d both laugh. It took a couple of weeks before I finally noticed the concern in her eyes. Then she asked: “What else did you do?”

That’s when I realized I wasn’t actually accomplishing anything. My campaign to increase productivity had become yet another distraction — and a significant one

It’s a big issue, sites like LifeHacker (and so many others) provide a constant stream of new tips and tools to improve your productivity, but they become an end in themselves.  Part of my job is to work through the hype and make recommendations to enterprises on how to improve personal productivity so I’m in an even worse situation,  I’m paid to try out all of this stuff. 

Still I have a real job as well so I have to work hard at finding balance, but tweaking is so much fun!

Within CSC we have recently been seeing a strong trend towards consumerization of IT with many tech savvy employees now pushing for control over their work IT, especially their desktop PCs, collaboration and personal productivity tools.  A few years ago these desktops were locked down business tools, now users are happily tweaking away and managing them themselves. 

Certainly they are happier – everyone likes control (at least when things are working) – but are they more effective?  Our current focus is on finding the sweet spot:

1. Giving people enough control to allow them to innovate and tweak to suit their personality and skill level
2. Making it easy to fix things when they go wrong, a bit of – protect people from themselves
3. Making their environments transparently secure
4. Making it easy to do the right thing, and find out what the “right thing is”

Hopefully avoiding Seth’s situation:

Thanks, Google. You’ve turned me into the most efficient time-waster ever

I’m currently doing lots of work on application delivery, reviewing the whole space and trying to map all of the different solutions to their associated business use cases and come up with decision support materials to guide customers through the maze and prioritise our investments.

What does the maze look like?  Well I’m not able to talk in detail about that right now, but Brian Madden sums up the situation well:

Ten years ago it was easy. We only had two options: Citrix (the new way), and traditional installs (the old way). But in 2007 we have application streaming, virtualization, and isolation; VDI- and Terminal Server-based server-based computing; local installations, local streaming, remote desktops, remote isolation, OS streaming, OS isolation…. the list goes on.

The one question I’m asked again and again is, “With all of these different methods of deploying apps, how do we figure out what we should use in our environment?” (The second most frequent question I get is, “what’s real and what’s not today?”

We too are trying to answer these questions, not just on a per application basis, which is the focus on Brian’s article, but for a customers entire application portfolio often numbering several thousand applications.  We’re also trying to ensure that our focus is not just on a point in time, ie we are trying to lay out a roadmap for change, that reflects the business, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and consumerization trends as well as the improvements in legacy application delivery technology.

We’re doing the work in the wiki that I posted about yesterday.