IT Myths Debunked

In these difficult economic times, it is critical that firms maximize their budgets, reduce waste, and improve productivity any way they can if they want to survive and thrive.  Too often, however, some very simple ways of achieving those goals are overlooked and this is especially true in the realm of Information Technology.  The three areas of highest return are electricity, licensing, and system maintenance.

Even when such measures are considered they are often considered too difficult to implement.  Recent advances in IT management systems have now opened the door to implementing these vital changes in a manner that has little to no impact on an organization's culture or business practices.  Now that these tools are available, it is imperative that responsible firms revisit their IT practices to take advantage of them.

Perhaps the biggest culprit is in simple electricity usage and its impact.  For example, some of the biggest misconceptions are:

You should never turn off your computer.

Your computer is designed to handle 40,000 on/off cycles. If you are an average user, that's significantly more cycles than you will initiate in the computer's five-to-seven-year-life. When you turn your computer off, you not only reduce energy use, you also lower heat stress and wear on the system, thereby actually prolonging its useful life.

Turning your computer off and then back on uses more energy than leaving it on.

The surge of power used by a CPU to boot up is far less than the energy your computer uses when left on for more than three minutes.  Moreover, the surge typically isn't even enough in modern systems to place stress on a component in the electrical system.

Screen savers save energy.

This is a common misconception. Screen savers were originally designed to help prolong the life of monochrome monitors. Those monitors are now technologically obsolete. Screen savers save energy only if they actually turn off the screen or, with laptops, turn off the backlight.

Network connections are lost when computers go into low-power/sleep mode.

Newer computers are designed to sleep on networks without loss of data or connection. CPUs with Wake on LAN (WOL) technology can be left in sleep mode overnight to wake up and receive data packets sent to the unit.

Just to show that this is more than a sterile academic train of thought, some examples of practical impact include:

• An average desktop computer requires 85 watts just to idle, even with the monitor off.  If that computer were in use or idling for only 40 hours a week instead of a full 168, over $40 in energy costs would be saved annually.  Multiply that by the number of  PC's in your organization and it adds up quickly.
• One computer left on 24 hours a day costs you between $115 and $160 in electricity costs annually while dumping 1,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere.
• A tree absorbs between 3 and 15 pounds of CO2 each year. That means up to 500 trees are needed to offset the annual emissions of one computer left on all the time.
• If each household in a region the size of the metro Boston area turned off its computer for just one additional hour per day, it would save $3.2 million in electricity costs and prevent 19,000 tons of CO2 from heating the atmosphere.
• Electricity production is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, ahead of transportation.

By using new technologies and techniques, any firm can easily implement policies to reduce their power consumption without altering their business models.  Bottom line is that taking basic steps to use electricity more efficiently and, thereby  stretch the value of your utility spend, is not only good business but also part of being a good corporate citizen.

License Management

License Management is the next biggest vampyre in the corporate closet that no one wants to waltz with.  However, given the potential savings, it's time to break out the dance card.  Improving license management has two key steps.

1. Make sure you are only paying for the licenses you actually use.  Most firms deploy at least twice as many licensed products as they actually need and, in many cases, it can be three or even four times as many as required.  That represents a huge drain on the budget that could be profitably redeployed elsewhere. 
2. Once you know how many licenses you actually need, it is necessary to ensure your firm is in the correct license program.  This can be extraordinarily tricky because the major software vendors have such elaborate and byzantine license schemes.  What is needed is a solid map to guide you through this labyrinth so you can match your firm's actual current and future needs with the appropriate license structure. 

Before now, actually tracking license usage was time consuming and cost prohibitive.  Now it is achievable in a rapid and highly cost effective manner.  Finding the best license scheme for your firm was once considered an act of sheer luck.  A combination of newly available technologies and solid experience can help accelerate that process to the point where it is worth doing.

System Maintenance 

The last main area of concern is system maintenance.  It sounds simple but, in practice it was very difficult and expensive.  When examined on its surface, the direct costs of performing this maintenance were obvious and daunting while the detrimental costs of forgoing the upgrades, patches, and documentation et al. were hidden and hard to calculate.  As a result, most firms did not prioritize system maintenance in their budgets blithely unaware of the tremendous amount of lost productivity they were experiencing. 

This was the old model.  The new model, using a managed services methodology, eliminates the high cost and much of the difficulty of performing the necessary maintenance to realize significant increases in productivity.

Given the potential benefits of improved value for spend, reduced waste, and increased productivity of human capital it is time to re-examine the old paradigms of how Information Technology is provided to your organization.