The Inovis Blog

Here is another great post that Tami Morrison-Ruben recently submitted to me. Tami is the Vice President of Enterprise IT and is one of my favorite Inovis employees.

There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t get somebody saying, “We need to convert to Macs. Everybody needs iPhones. I want Vista. Let’s use Office 2007.” Everybody’s got the latest and greatest, and because we work at a technology company, I believe the level is even more hyped. The question is, how do you decide what actually fits with your company and what’s not going to fit, regardless of hype?

Our company’s mantra is to implement and streamline, standardize and consolidate, to make the company run more efficiently. If you’re working for a company of five, six, or twelve people and everybody has a different computer, different laptop, different workstation, different cell device, then that’s OK. If you’re working for a company that has 600 people, that’s not OK. And the reason for that is not cost effective and it is difficult to support. You need to make sure that whatever you use—both hardware and software—works with the company’s internal software.

Choosing a PDA: So, the BIG question we’ve come across has been, “Why don’t we use iPhones? Why do you standardize on BlackBerrys?” This is one of the big topics we’ve had to wrestle. Over a year ago, we realized that the Trios were not working in terms of being a PDA device. We were having all sorts of problems, and we went out—we being the IT group—put together a list of questions and began searching for the right application to use. We ran Good Link, we also ran a server for Blackberry, and we did an analysis. We got different types of PDAs from different companies and we had a group of folks do a Beta test. What we came back with, after all the due diligence was done, was that the Blackberry was a more reliable platform to run, and the decision was made after all of the options were presented—and there were options, and our Executive team made the decision—that we would standardize on Blackberry and that we would retire the Good Link server. So, we have done that. We opted to standardized on two Blackberry devices: one was the 8800 and the other one was the Pearl. They’re both PDAs, they both have enough functionality; there’s a few different functions and services that we have. Streamlining our offering allows us to support the devices efficiently with limited costs, and if somebody breaks theirs, then it’s easily replaced. You are, as an employee, responsible for your cell phone and/or your PDA, as well as your workstation. We stress to our employees that if you run over it with your car, drop it in the toilet, or break it in some other way, then it really is yours to purchase. That is a company policy.

The next question your employees might ask would be, “Why can’t I have an iPhone?” If your employees are bombarding you with the same question, maybe our response to this question can help you form your solution. You can! We have implemented iMap to give iPhones the ability to connect to our server and receive email. Here’s the catch. If you are an employee that fits the policy and criteria for receiving a PDA device, you are issued one of the standard PDAs. If you want an iPhone, that is fine, and we will connect it to the server. Because the iPhone is not a standard for our company and AT&T, our provider, does not recognize the iPhone in our cellular/data to plan, you are responsible for all of your individual cellular charges and data on that device. We will be more than happy to connect you. We will not service the phone and if it breaks, you have to go to an iPhone provider to get it fixed.
A couple of other things to note about the iPhone:
- iPhones do not have a removable Sim card. Cell numbers are attached to the iPhone service making it impossible to “port” numbers to another device.

- iPhone is a “pull” solution. You must request your email to sync on your phone, (BB is a “push” automatically sending emails to your device.)

Along the same line, if you want a different PDA, or you don’t fit the company profile and you want to connect your PDA, we’ll be more than happy to hook you up, but you are responsible for all of those charges.

What about Workstations? We went through an analysis and made the decision. I say we, and again I mean a committee. We took folks from engineering, customer support, sales, and so on, all across and we sent out requirements for different workstations whether it was laptops or desktops, engineering grade, or depending on what work you did- what you would need and standardized on Dell. We are still transitioning out some of the old IBM Thinkpads, and there were some Sony’s and so on. We have a workstation refresh that happens every quarter, which we post on our company’s communication site so employees can see if they’re up for an upgrade. So, we needed to standardize not only on the hardware, but the applications that we were running.

We need the supportability, and it’s our job in IT to make sure that folks have the tools they need to do their job. So when we standardized on Dell, there were actually four different systems that the committee created and then delegated the requirements for each system. Depending on a person’s job function, s/he would receive a Dell workstation (which would be a desktop), or a latitude laptop. It’s not done by title; it’s done by job function. If one travels a lot, if one’s developing at home, so on, so forth. If you fall under one of those two categories, then what grade you get will depend on your job role. So, we have pretty much every day computers, every day work, and then we’ve got the engineering grade, which is much larger, more robust, a lot more memory, so on and so forth. And we do that so we can support and ensure that you can still do your job.

We are still on Microsoft Office 2003. We have been beta testing Office 2007 for the last six months, and we have found a number of glitches with Office 2007. We are not able to upgrade and release 2007 to the company yet. We are waiting for a patch from Microsoft. But Office 2007 is so different, that we’re actually going to have to have core training classes and there are features and functionalities that are not in 2007 that are in 2003. Finance is taking a big hit. There are some compatibility issues such as IE7 as is not compatible with Siebel, which is our CM tool.
Regarding MAC, there are too many issues to use in our environment. The biggest is expense, the other is supportability not to mention that we have applications that are not compatible and just won’t work with MAC.

Bottom line is that we need to determine what the real need is. Most of the time, it’s, “I’ve got this great idea, or I’ve seen something and I want it.” And you don’t think about that, you just don’t. If you look at it from an organizational standpoint and you do this company wide, it puts a new perspective on, unless you’re going to do this as a one off.

When someone asks me about an iPhone, MAC, or Office 2007, here’s my favorite response: “Let me help you make an informed choice by familiarizing you with what we can support today, and then we’ll see how we can help with what you want to do.”

You have to be real, and you have to know what the requirements are. We keep up with the newest technology. We do so much testing inside the IT department that nobody knows we do. My team is made of engineers and they love the latest and greatest. You would be surprised of the testing that goes on before we make an educated decision. So, for your company, figure out what will work, what won’t work, and then help those who question you to make an informed choice by familiarizing them with what you can support today.