As touched up on during my last blog where we were discussing Deployment best practices, the total cost of owning and using PCs remains high despite PC prices falling.  This is largely due to cost of deploying them. Research has shown that the average deployment cost of a PC can be around $600 per PC with costs exceeding this figure not uncommon.

An effective and well thought our deployment strategy can cut costs by 50%. This translates to a saving of up to $300 per PC.

In recently times, cost has become a major factor in the decision of many companies to delay technology refreshes, working for a technology service company who have PC deployments as a core competency, I have seen this trend first hand. When you couple this with cost-driven reductions within IT departments leaving resources capable of deploying PC’s at a premium, the importance of an effective deployment framework becomes of paramount importance.

As the economy recovers, it is likely that many organizations will begin to upgrade their PC base.

What would an effective strategy for deploying PC’s look like, to my mind the high level stages are described below:

Pre-Assessment

  • Define current mode of operations and work out the associated costs for transforming to a more efficient deployment practice.
  • Define the maturity of existing deployment practices and identify specific factors that can be improved.

Planning and Design

  •  Look at technologies and avenues to enable the implementation of automated deployment solutions that can be customized to meet requirements.

Implementation

  • Execute on what has been planned and designed based on the outcomes from the pre-assessment phase including use of ITIL delivery framework and Project Management processes and personnel.

Management

  • Continual improvements and lessons learned application to the service methodologies and tools designed and used to reduce deployment costs and reduce network utilization during deployment and cycle times while mitigating the risks associated with PC deployments.

Together, these elements can provide companies using these fundamentals with significant competitive advantages. What else would you consider as being vital cogs in the wheel when looking at deployment efficiencies?