[MACEP] crossing the platform divide

[Quentin Hartman]

On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 10:03 -0800, Tim Chase wrote:
<snip>
> The primary difficulties in having a diverse OS landscape come when you try 
> to implement something district-wide, I think.  Actually I would love to 
> get some feedback from techies who gnash their teeth at the thought of dual 
> schools: can you give a short list of the difficulties that it presents?

Yes, district-wide things do cause problems, and in many cases those
problems are not evident to the users or even much of the administration
which makes the IT staff's job even harder because it make is more
difficult to generate "buy-in" for homogenizing platforms. In my
district we are about 60% PCs and 30% macs (PC's growing) and it is a
challenge, especially since within that split we have 5 OSes: WIndows
98, Windows 2k/XP, Mac Classic, and Mac OS X. So what looks like two
platforms on the surface really 4 (2k/XP are close enough to each other
to count as one in this context) platforms. 
The core of the problem this platform diversity causes becomes most
apparent when you try to have a managed IT system. It makes everything
cost more, which is a fact that is often hidden when everyone is doing
their own thing and there is no one at the "top" who has a view of the
overall cost. By "cost" I men not just money, but time, training,
planning, user perception, everything. It can be a small increase, or it
can be quite significant, on the order of 2x or more.
Take technicians, for example. I either need to hire a diverse group of
techs who each specialize on one of the platforms, or I need to hire
techs who are experienced enough on each of these platforms to be able
to handle most things that will come their way on any of them. In either
case it costs more than if I had one platform. I either need more
people, or the people I need must be more highly trained, and therefor
command a higher salary. If I only had one platform, I could be hiring
relatively green techs who only know one platform or the other, and not
need to duplicate skill sets. So the cost increase in this area can be
anywhere from nothing (if you are very lucky) to 200%.
Another example would be widely needed applications, like office suites
or gradebook programs. Perhaps there is one that works on all of your
platforms and this isn't applicable. But even there is often a
compromise there, where you settle on something that has 80% of the
features of something else in order to get that cross-platform
capability. That's the best case, no cost increase, and maybe a
compromise on feature-set. Worst case (which I've faced a couple times
in my in my situation) I have 4 applications to buy, train on, and
support. My costs just went up by 4 times versus a single platform
organization. I also lose most if not all volume licensing discounts I
might have otherwise enjoyed because rather than buying 1000 copies of
one thing, I'm buying 250 of one, 100 of another, 350 of another, and
300 of the fourth.
Again, a lot of these costs have traditionally been hidden in school
districts (in my experience) because there has not been an emphasis on
keeping costs down and IT has not been managed well. Everyone was often
allowed to do their own thing, which leads to a great diversity of
software and equipment. Unfortunately, that introduced significant
inefficiencies which become unmanageable as the organization grows. I do
not believe we can afford these inefficiencies in education. We just
aren't funded well enough.
I really think that a managed IT infrastructure is important in any
sizable organization, and schools are no exception. The best way to have
an efficient managed IT infrastructure, is to standardize on one
platform. It doesn't matter a whole lot which one, they each have their
strengths and weaknesses, but having just one really makes things much
simpler and cost effective. By my estimates, my IT infrastructure is
costing on average 80% more than it would if it were centered around a
single platform. And again, I'm also considering somewhat more
intangible costs, like ease of management, training, scalability, etc,
not just columns in a ledger.

-- 
-Best Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-
Technology Coordinator
South Lane School District 45j3
Cottage Grove, Oregon
(541)767-3778
http://www.slane.k12.or.us