Common operating environment - why it doesn't make sense

A common operating environment is proposed as an intelligent strategy by many IT organisations. And it is an intelligent strategy for IT organisation (internal and external to propose) it keeps many people in work fiddling with technology that is best left alone. Unfortunately is not is not in fact a sound strategy for most businesses who would be better served by an appliance model. This model operates successfully in every other domain where their are hardware systems and operating systems. It has issues - but the issues are far less significant than the absurd costs, risks and complexity introduce the common operating environment (and what follows from it).

While most vendors talk about virtual clients, blades and phones and laptops are becoming increasing attractive to consumers and SMEs, many of the devices bought by large enterprises still of course are still desktop PCs.

Historically an enterprise clients were focus predominantly on an enterprise applications. Several trends are changing this:

• SaaS is meaning that in many cases the applications (services if you prefer) being accessed by someone via enterprise device are not in fact delivered by the enterprise.
• Externally facing systems mean that increasingly the applications provided by an enterprise are oriented at external parties where they will be access by devices that are not controlled by the enterprise delivering the service (this includes the case of a working accessing their enterprise systems from the home PC).
  
• Phones are increasingly being allowed to access corporate systems. Few people are seriously suggest that everyone in an organistion must of should use the same phone (because most people would accept that different people have different needs).

So once it is accepted that the devices will access external applications, and the applications will be accessed by external devices - it is clear that one can't practically technically mandate a standard operating environment for users.

Any good application architecture being constructed (or revised) today - will recognise that heterogeneous client side environment e.g. they will be targeted at browsers (augmented by open technologies e.g. AJAX, Adobe, Flash etc.) and support dynamic (usually on-demand) deployment of client side code. The one exception are those applications built to try and lock people into Microsoft (e.g. via the use of their Office suite as a client side application GUI framework).

This is not an argument for unnecessary diversity of clients (or appliances) i.e. clearly if their a pool of people in an enterprise doing more or less the same thing the simplest things is for them all to have the same appliance. It does however suggest a different economic model, lifecycle and management paradigm. One that is far more economical and efficient than the one advocated my traditional IT advisors.

[WIP]