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Written by Tony Phelps
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Thursday, 17 November 2005 |
One of the easiest ways to save money in business is to establish some
standardisation. Standardisation offers economic, productivity and
management benefits in many areas, but where computers are concerned it
is particularly powerful - thus the “Standard Operating Environment”.
Imagine you are responsible for 6 computers in an office. Jonas in the
Stores has an aging Windows 98 computer with Microsoft Office version
8. Mary in Accounts has a brand new Windows XP machine, with Microsoft
Office 2003. Silas in Sales has a quite-recent Windows 2000 computer
and has decided to ditch Microsoft Office in favour of the free &
open-source OpenOffice equivalent. The other three computers were
bought at the same time and are all Windows NT and don't have any
office suite at all.
You should be able to appreciate some of the potential problems that
could occur. One of the Windows NT staff receive an email with a
spreadsheet attachment – it can't be opened because there is no
spreadsheet application on that computer. Mary creates a fancy invoice
using her state-of-the-art Microsoft Word, but when Jonas prints it out
for a customer it looks dreadful because his old software can't
understand all the newfangled bits of the document. Meanwhile Silas is
creating quotes and brochures that noone else in the company can open
because he is saving them in a format that Office cannot understand.
Now imagine all 6 computers are the same – Windows XP with Microsoft
Office 2003. But each computer user installed Office themselves. They
chose different options, they installed to different locations, and
they customised the configurations to their own liking. Silas is off
sick, and Mary has to find the quote that he provided to a major
customer. Where did he file it? How come he has different toolbars in
Word? Why doesn't he have the same components installed?
The result in both situations is lost time and poorer service. A
Standard Operating Environment just makes things 'the same' from one
computer to another. It means that Microsoft Office is installed the
same way, with the same components, on each computer. It means you can
sit down in front of any of them, and know your way around. From a
network administrator's point of view, it means that if there is a
problem on one, the same solution will apply to all the others.
Likewise, the process of installing something new to one will be the
same on all the others.
While the Standard Operating Environment is a bit of a holy grail – it
is simply too easy to change the settings in applications and on
computers – there are increasingly sophisticated tools and utilities
that can help control computers, and time and again they have been
proven to pay for themselves several times over. So, if you run or
manage more than a couple of computers, consider what your own Standard
Operating Environment should be. Talk to an IT company for detailed
advice on what could be done and how much it would cost, and compare to
how much time you and your staff or colleagues might be wasting. |
