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System Age and Maintenance Costs
One of the reasons
that I came home between the training events in London and Frankfurt was to
cover a customer briefing at the Cupertino Executive Briefing Center -although
it also saved HP money, and let's face it, everyone's budget is still pretty
tight.
The briefing was an
overview of the HP and HP IT Transformation. However, there was a specific
deeper dive and conversation around our desktop management - everything from
asset management, self serve processes, to help desk processes. While I often
speak about mission critical environments, it is great to also have a glimpse
into the desktop and notebook environments - especially since as a user, I'm a
customer of our internal services.
It's been a two
years since I last got a new notebook, and I got to use some of the new
processes in person. Instead of waiting for my business to have available funds
for new notebooks, we now get automated e-mails when it is time to refresh our
systems. We select our user profile, and a week or two later, the system shows
up at our desk.
Then, instead of
someone from HP IT disappearing with our old and new system for half a day or
more, we log into the new notebook, finish some minor set up ourselves. Both
systems are then unplugged from the network, software is run on both systems,
and all of our settings and data are copied to the new system. Even better, I
can do this at home at night, so I'm not sitting around the office looking
useless, waiting for my systems to come back. I have much less downtime, and IT
doesn't have someone spending a lot of time just copying data from one system
to another. Even better, they have made this process easy enough that most of
my co-workers who normally call the helpdesk (or me) whenever they run into any
sort of problem now do this on their own, with no help.
But the interesting
part of this past year is seeing the impact of the economy on our help desk.
Due to the poor economy in 2009, HP pushed out the refresh on some systems by
another 6 months. It turns out, that they can see a direct co-relation to the number
of help desk calls as they did this, something that we could never track in the
past. Users of systems that are older than our usual refresh age are now
logging more calls, more downtime, and more repairs than they were in the past.
We helped save the company some money during the economic downturn, but it is
definitely driving up our maintenance budget. Since our goal here at HP is to
keep our maintenance costs low, you can bet that this will change as the
economy becomes more predictable.
However, the biggest
difference today compared to a number of years ago is that we can now track the
impact of decisions like pushing out the refresh rate for desktops and
notebooks, something we never could do in the past.
This begs the
question about what happens in a mission critical environment. There are lots
and lots of mission critical systems out there that have been in place for 5
years, 6 years, 10 years, or more. While the server life cycle definitely is
longer than desktops and notebooks, at some point, we run into the same issue -
old systems cost more to maintain than new systems (especially after the
warranty expires). Just because the system is still up and running, and has
been paid for, doesn't mean that it is cheaper than buying a new systems. We're
figuring that out at HP for our internal use.
Does this apply
outside of HP? Can you actually track the relationship between system age and
maintenance costs? What have you found?
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BCS
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maintenance
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support
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system age
