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I got the chance to meet with an IT Director and took the opportunity to ask him a quick questions, three actually. They’re the ones I think underpin how your IT really performs.

You see one of the discussions I’ve been having is how important or useful those top level reports on performance/utilization actually are? 

I know we have to supply these kind of reports to answer specific business or technical issues, however I feel we should also be considering the real user experience, by taking three things that we can measure to illustrate how effectively we deliver. Anyway, I digress.

Here are three questions that I asked and why:

• How long does it take for a new starter to be configured and operational?

By that I mean the following: A desk, a working IT standard desktop/virtual machine, an account, access to their various applications and what is the average lead time quoted by helpdesk to a user, “sorry love it can take a few weeks for everyone to do their bit” – it’s unacceptable, particularly if we consider the employee/consultant cost, so you mean the internal onboard cost of a user might be £3,000 because your IT teams, your billing, your helpdesk process doesn’t work unless someone is constantly chasing calls?

On this basis it might be costing you a few thousand pounds or more per user joining in downtime.

• How long it takes to build or rebuild a desktop?

But before I hear the standard 45 minutes, ok 45 minutes, but does that include the packages, the layered applications, the security patches and everything else.?

If I take Jill a standard user from accounts, log a call and say “please rebuild my pc, it keeps crashing”, from the point of logging how long does it take for an engineer to visit/call and ask questions, debate it, collect it, obtain a spare pc, allocate and configure it, then take Jills one for it to be rebuilt and returned a day or two later. Might it be a week? A few days to complete?

Would business funds not be better spent replacing the hardware than rebuilding in terms of man day cost? Do I want to be paying £150 a day for a few engineers, a helpdesk guy and in user time when I can buy a Dell pc under an agreement for just over £400?

• How long does it take to build a new server?

The total day lead time in provisioning and delivering a server from the time when I log a call to help desk or send an email to the project team, “give me a DL380 G6 with 16GB RAM, 2 cpus and 4x300GB disks). As part of this, I’ll use the example, “I want to replace WSINT1982, our DL380G3 which runs one of our SharePoint sites”, how long would it take to obtain sign off, to get a quotation, delivery, space allocated, the operating system layered applications and application loaded? Weeks? Months? What are the technical barriers to delivery from asset to purchasing, from racking to middleware or operating system load, and what technologies and changes in process can be made to resolve this.

They might be small issues, ones which at a board/senior level don’t matter, but it’s the little things that underpin the big ones.

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