Agile workstation design

The aim was to build of a common set of IT services, adaptable and competitive: data networks, local data servers, workstation and associated user support. One of the most challenging parts was to design a single workstation platform. Universality was mandatory to guarantee 3 key drivers of cost and availability for subsidiary companies using the corporate IT services: security, compatibility and supportability. Security was clearly a corporate IT department concern, with the priority being to guarantee confidence and availability of business information and digital business tools. Compatibility involved the commitment which the corporate IT department made to deliver a workstation platform compatible with legacy systems and key local ERP. And supportability implied a huge number of support tickets avoided at the service desk with the corresponding cost savings.

Over the years, operating incident and problem management has allowed Everience to acquire a deep knowledge of the subsidiaries’ needs and constraints. The second step consisted in designing layered systems architecture guidance documents for the master PC, with the assumption that the hardware platforms had been chosen from a given catalogue of models. And finally, Everience developed a tool to help local IT staff to automatically install a compliant workstation, in any country, in any language, over any type of local IT infrastructure, in order to ensure skill maintenance and to stay committed to the Service Level Agreement decided upon with the subsidiaries. Everience is in charge of the level 3 support and the PC assets corrective maintenance. The master allows incident volume regarding hardware and OS to break down (from 20% to 40%). Moreover, workstation settlement delays have been reduced dramatically (divided by 4.5) and compliance has reached 100%.

Up to strong IT corporate governance frameworks, stable assumptions were made allowing us to design an efficient universal master.  Worldwide framework agreements for PC procurement were also mandatory for success. Everience used this return on experience to build and set up the same desktop engineering solutions everywhere. Mastering and remote distribution are the key activities capitalizing on problem management lessons and have started a continuous improvement loop.