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Washed up thinking?

IT | John Tate | 1 May 2007

Finance directors should beware of the risks and work
required to manage Vista upgrades, thinks John Tate.

Last month my washing machine died, predictably on Friday 13th. The water refused to pump out of the drum and coincided with the imminent return of my two eldest children to university. So it had to get fixed. The five-year old machine had had similar problems three times over the last couple of years and in total had cost about the same to fix as a new machine. So this time my wife and I decided to do just that, with a surprisingly cheap five year onsite warranty. The machine was selected and does pretty much the same as the old device. As joint budget holders of our finances, my wife and I decided to make the change, justified of course after a careful discounted cashflow evaluation. Or should I have looked at the payback period or return on capital employed?

The IT survey in this month’s issue reveals some interesting information, though not about washing machines. High up on the list is the apparent lack of interest in Microsoft Vista with over 90 per cent of charities stating that they are not planning to upgrade to it in the next year. Presumably the organisations responding to the survey do not see the benefit of the upgrade and hence are not attracted in the short term. They are not inclined to replace XP or earlier operating systems, in part because they are not broken like my old washing machine.

Every desktop/portable device will need new software installing. All the applications in use will need to be tested on the new system to see if they work properly in the new environment. An interesting Wikipedia site has been created that lists the status of applications ability to work under Vista, categorising them into ‘products that work, has problems that can be solved/ minor unsolved and heavy problems/ currently incompatible’. This highlights the number of products that potentially do not work or do not quite work under Vista. More details at http://blogs.zdnet.com.

All charities considering an upgrade will need to look at the specification of their current equipment to see if it will run Vista and many will need to replace these before they can carry out the full upgrade. To add to this challenge, when new PCs/laptops are purchased buyers will be encouraged to purchase them with the Vista operating system. If this is taken up the buyer is then likely to have to support users with both Vista and previous version(s) of the Microsoft operating system, unless they upgrade all the users to Vista when they buy a new machine. IT departments will know the challenge of supporting multiple desktop environments. Looking again at the survey results, nearly one in five charities have PCs that are over three years old. It is likely that many of these will be replaced in the next 12 months. Will the purchaser be able to resist the temptation of Vista? To add to this, the survey shows that nearly 80 per cent of charities use laptops in their organisation. The life of these machines can be considerably less than a standard desktop device and are often replaced two or three years after purchase.

Finance directors should beware of the risks and work required to manage new Vista machines before making this decision. To help support this case several pieces of work have been done on the cost of ownership of a PC in an organisation. Gartner, for example, has suggested that it can cost close to £5,000 per annum for an organisation to manage and support a PC. Many charities expenditure is well below these figures and organisations are looking to bring these costs down. Upgrading to Vista in the short term may result in the opposite effect.

An interesting article was posted last December at www.techrepublic. com. Included in this report is the comment that ‘it is difficult, if not impossible to make the case for Vista on IT labour savings or other direct IT cost savings alone.’ Readers of Charity Finance in November last year may recall that a debate has been taking place on whether to hand back the IT budget to the user departments. If users want Vista perhaps this is a time to consider this option?

Back on the home front my microwave is acting a bit dodgy. The good news is that you can now buy an internet enabled model (see www.lginternetfamily.co.uk). If these include Vista functionality perhaps they should be avoided for the time being, however, if they are XP compliant then perhaps they are worth a gander.

John Tate is a leading IT analyst in the charity sector and chair of Citra

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