If you think looking after one PC is hard, try managing thousands. Easily-supported laptops are good for IT, good for users and good for the business. We help you learn to love your IT department (or at least understand it better).

You’re stuck, ‘lost in translation’, in some distant hotel room and your notebook has a problem. When you call your IT department, you hope that they can solve your problems quickly and remotely. Wouldn’t it be great if they could tell you how to restore damaged files from a backup, remotely access your PC and fix it over the internet or print to any HP printer using a single print driver? The last thing you want to hear is “We’ll fix it when you get back”.

Notebook computers are at the heart of fast-moving, responsive companies. There are already 5.5 million business laptops in the UK and it is the fastest-growing part of the PC business[i]. Mobile working is a growing trend. But giving everyone a laptop is really just the start. A business needs to be able to support their mobile users.

Even in the office, there is a difference between notebooks that are designed for business – reliable, secure and IT department-friendly – and the rest. If a problem takes a long time to fix, it doesn’t just waste the laptop user’s time. It also wastes IT’s time. Laptops that are not easy to support and manage simply cost more. This hidden cost is sometimes surprisingly high.

The hidden cost of support

According to HP research[1], a typical user calls technical support 1.35 times a month. If the problem can be solved in the first phone call it costs around £10. However, if a technician has to travel to the user and fix the problem at their desk, it costs £40-100.

Desk-side visits account for 13 percent of PC support incidents, but consume 46 percent of the average PC support budget. Over the service life of a given laptop, this can add up to a substantial amount of money. This is why laptops designed for remote support are so important.

IT departments talk about manageability to describe how easy it is to configure, support and manage a fleet of notebooks. When you multiply these support challenges by the number of notebooks in your company, it’s easy to see that manageability can have a huge financial impact on the business. Without it, users suffer and IT departments spend more money fixing common problems.

The 90/10 problem

Manageability also determines what your IT department can do for your business. Call it the 90/10 problem. According to Gartner, around 90 percent of IT spending goes on routine maintenance and support such as inventory, security, support, theft prevention, encryption, break/fix and end-user support. This means that they only spend ten percent on innovation that helps the business.

This is not what CIOs want. CIOs want to ensure that IT is a competitive advantage for the company, not an ongoing operational expense. Gartner’s 2006 CIO agenda found that their top three priorities were:

1. Improving business processes
2. Reducing company-wide operating costs
3. Attracting and growing customer relationships

Ever had one of those days? You wanted to do something big and important but ended up doing a hundred small and trivial things instead. Your plans died the death of a thousand interruptions. Fire-fighting problems, helping people out, answering emails: it is all urgent, but it isn’t always important. This is what happens in IT departments that suffer the 90/10 problem.

If laptops (and desktops, for that matter) were easier to manage then IT departments would spend less time ‘keeping the lights on’ and more time contributing to the business. Even a ten percent cut in routine tasks would double the resources available for innovation.

Businesses expect a lot from IT – software to run the business, security for the company’s data, technology to support new products and services. At the same time, the IT department is usually under constant pressure to cut costs. Often, this includes shaving the purchase price of new hardware, regardless of the long-term cost of ownership.

The art of manageability

Although notebooks all look very similar, under the skin there are significant differences. These nuances can make the difference between a notebook that is easy to manage and one that is a nightmare for your IT department.

Here are some of the things to do when selecting notebooks that will make them easier to support:

1. Take a whole-of-business and whole-of-life look at your laptop fleet. How much does a technical support incident cost? Can you find ways to reduce that cost? Do you factor support and manageability into your purchase decisions? (If not, you risk spending penny-wise and pound-foolish.)
2. At the same time, think about the hidden costs of unreliable, poorly-designed and insecure computers. For example, Gartner reports that 15-20 percent of notebooks break down every year so getting more reliable notebooks can reduce the business impact of these problems. Similarly, the majority of data theft happens because of lost or stolen computers. Choosing laptops with strong security can stop a stolen laptop becoming headline news for your business.
3. Take an inventory. Do you know how many notebooks your organisation has? Are they all up to date? Does everyone who has a notebook need it and use it? The ability to do an inventory quickly and efficiently is another manageability requirement in its own right.
4. Look for notebooks that are designed for a corporate environment. Avoid consumer laptops dressed up for business use. Look for well-tested, reliable hardware (including metal cases, not plastic), strong security features (such as fingerprint scanners), hardware support for remote management (using Intel Centrino® Pro™ technology), support for Microsoft Windows Vista and a supplier that understands the needs of IT departments.
5. Are you running management software, such as HP OpenView, that makes managing a fleet of PCs less of a chore? Do your systems support these management tools?

Help IT and it’ll help you

IT departments everywhere under pressure to cut costs and deliver business-changing innovation. If you understand the challenges that your IT department faces you can help them do both. Choosing and using notebooks designed for manageability is a great way to start.