In the first part I will discuss the business scenario, and in the second part I will discuss the technical solution implemented and finally in the conclusion I will explain what we achieved after implementing new solutions. I was motivated to write this article after I received a call from one of my previous colleagues. She told me they are so happy and really productive with the solution that I when I was with them and how they gained competitive advantage. It seems that they also advised several of their customers to implement the same solution over a period of time. I am really happy to hear that and I would like to share the same with you.
Part 1 The business scenario!
Any business manager is concerned about support cost, both IT related and non IT related. The minimum the support cost is better it looks in the balance sheet. The biggest challenge facing by almost all the IT business managers or owners is how to reduce support cost, while improving efficiency of employees, reduce work load. There are volumes of books, and thousands of articles were written on this topic. And importantly there are big corporate companies with products that they claim to reduce support cost, if you invest few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on the size of your organization. Despite all these most do not know how to lower support costs in the best possible manner, with minimal or no investment. Surprised! Yes with minimal or no investment! Read the post, you will understand.
I would like to take an actual business case, for which I proposed and implemented a solution to explain this further. For confidential and NDA reasons I cannot revel the company and employees names. The company was our client, to whom we provide IT infrastructure solutions and I was assigned as senior Trusted IT Security solutions manager in the mid 2006. When we were discussing on how to reduce IT support costs with one of the business managers in that mid size company, who was a no-techie, said like this. “That it is impossible! Possible only if you can invest few hundred thousand dollars if not millions, which can be recovered over a period of few years”.
Then I asked him what kind of support issues your IT support staff had to deal every day? I would summarize his answer in the following points.
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To manage 500 computers in the company at multiple locations they had
- 10 full time support staff
- 4 part time support staff (students from a local university)
- Some agreements with local service providers for remote locations
- A manager to manage all of them
- The above staff is apart from system, database and network administrator(s)
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The work is repeating every day involving the following activities (or facing problems)
- Changing mostly desktop configuration settings due to unauthorized applications, malware or users changing settings unknowingly
- Malware removing (spyware, adware, virus, malware)
- Re-installing existing applications
- In some cases they have to reimage the Windows OS
- It is becoming increasingly difficult to manage remote locations due to limited resources
- Sometimes support staff needed to work overtime to fix the problems when trouble shooting takes lot of time
- Due to troubleshooting activity the user is not able to work (loss of productivity)
- Computers are becoming slow after few weeks or months of re-imaging
- Some users do not want to re-image OS due to application and OS settings
- Experiencing delays in deliverables, for example due to computer problem, sometimes they are not able to prepare reports on time or type documents on time.
He also said that due to overheads and delay in closing a call, we were not able to spend more money and time on security awareness and other employee training or benefits. I was surprised that this manager was security conscious. Later I found that few months ago a security breach by a simple mistake of a manager caused them to lose a big project to a competitor.
Note: In my prior assignment I had experience in providing cost saving solutions, mostly relating to support and IT security related. I was largely successful in reducing IT support cost by over 50%, create security awareness among employees and improve overall organization efficiency.
After a week of first meeting with the business manager, with little home work about the company operations, I took an appointment with the same manager to propose a solution. My previous experience in similar solution was very helpful in this for this fast response. In that meeting I asked him the following.
Would you be thrilled to reduce half of support staff (except dedicated network support team), reduce their work load, at the same time improve overall organizational operational efficiency, reduce client project delivery times and many more? He was really puzzled and looked at me with disbelief, but still very much interested to listen to my proposal. Then I had shown him the following points un-hiding one by one from a printed paper.
- Improve IT support staff efficiency and reduce their workload
- Reduce IT support staff to almost half
- Reduce number of calls to support department by less than half
- Reduce duration of down time on each desktop when a problem arises
- Improve over all employee efficiency, thus making them happy and improving productivity
- End users should not able to install application that are not officially allowed
- Even malware would not be a major problem (can this really possible?)
- Reduce electricity bill (Green IT)
- Create IT security awareness among your employees with part of the costs saved (this is my key interest, as I conduct security awareness program)
- Even improve remote locations support and over all employee efficiency and satisfaction
- Most importantly balance security and productivity
- All the above without investing a million dollars, which you need to recover over a period of time
- Finally make your CEO happy, and let your balance sheet get more attention at the end of the year
He was really curious to learn more about what I had to say next. With disbelief and hesitation he wanted to test my solution on few desktops. Since I already know the solution, I asked him to give me 10 desktops from a department where they had most problems without giving him much technical details. Looking at my confidence, he agreed for my request even though I did not explain him my technical solution completely.
Part 2: Implemented technical solution!
Tools / techniques used for testing
Microsoft Steady State (free, formerly Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit), Faronics Deep Freeze and Faronics Anti Executable, Microsoft Power Save Management options (free) and Faronics Power Save.
Initially we choose to implement Microsoft solution on 5 desktops and Faronics solution on 5 desktops. We choose to upgrade RAM to minimum of 1 GB and in some to 2 GB due to heavy resource access.
Advantages of Reboot to restore solution: Microsoft Steady State and Faronics Deep Freeze are the two products which will restore the desktop to the original, no matter what you do on the computer after a simple reboot. Deleting files, changing settings, malware installation, or any other change, just a reboot will simply revert back all the changes made in this session. Since these tools also manage disk defragment, which will help Windows to run like first day.
Advantages of Anti Executable: Microsoft Steady State and Faronics Anti Executable both provide the option to allow only certain applications (application white listing, black listing or grey listing). This will allow only white listed applications and warn the user about grey listed applications and will not allow any other application that is not approved.
Advantages of Green IT (power save options): We used Microsoft power save options and Faronics Power Save to turn off monitors after 10 minutes of inactivity and turn off computer after 1 hour of inactivity.
These solutions were mostly implemented in education sector (shared access), mainly Microsoft and Faronics promoted these solutions only for education and public access computers. I was really surprised why they did not promote in corporate environment? These are really good products to implement in any kind of setup (including at your home) with proper planning.
Final Solution Implemented: After three weeks of evaluation the manager realized that he had no support call from those 10 computers. At this time we did not have a way of testing how much power we saved during the three weeks. In the mean while I gathered some more information on how best we can implement this solution and proposed a complete solution. Finally they had decided to implement Faronics products for various other reasons apart from the following:
- Better centralized management of Deep Freeze and Power Save which allows Windows updates
- Product support from vendor (obviously Microsoft does not have support options for free product)
- Faronics can run on both 32 bit 64 bit versions of Windows , but Steady state is compatible only with 32 bit version of Windows
- Faronics Enterprise versions have better centralized management options compared to Microsoft solutions
- Faronics Power Save got more control and audit and report options than Microsoft Power Management, which can also be configure remotely
Products Implemented: Faronics Deep Freeze Enterprise, Faronics Anti Executable Enterprise and Microsoft Power Options configured centrally.
After preparing the final report and coming up with detailed implementation policy based on user roles and buying some additional hard ware (RAM upgrade to a minimum of 1 GB for required computers and some new computers for better performance).
Initially we had decided to implement the solution in the entire organization in phased manner with 100 computers each time, one month apart. After completing the first phase implementation they saw tremendous improvement in employee efficiency, reduced support calls. After one month of testing, we had decided to implement the new policy on all computers as soon as possible. Over the next 45 days we have completed the implementation instead of 5 months as planned initially. Each and every desktop had to be prepared (mostly reimage), some hard disks had be portioned to store files locally. Each and every desktop was also preconfigured to access a network drive.
Conclusion: The following results were observed!
- Total number of support calls had gone down by 80% to less than 10 per day from over 60 per day.
- Support personal had more time with reduced work load, so they were assigned different tasks, concentrate on creating awareness or transferred to different departments and part time employees were no more required
- They had decided to reduce the no of support staff to 5 from 14 (including 4 part time personal)
- The managers saw efficiency in over employee performance and reduced delivery time of tasks
- Power bill was reduced by nearly 20% (at the same time implemented moving sensors to turn on and off lights, ACs and created awareness among employees about the same)
- The management had decided to upgrade some more computers for the end users, invested in LCD display panels, IT Security awareness programs for all users (I was part of this) and other related programs
References:
- Microsoft Steady State Download
- Microsoft Steady State technical FAQ
- Faronics content library for white papers, case studies and more
- Faronics Power Save Advanced Calculator, a good page to understand on how much you might save
