Message from Taos CEO and Co-Founder, Ric Urrutia, and Co-Founder, Alexis Tatarsky

Ask a typical user about IT Support and they’re likely to talk about the helpful person who comes to their desk when they’ve broken something, or to show them how to get something done that they couldn’t figure out on their own.  Yet the face of IT is literally changing as that most expensive and inefficient form of support is being replaced by automated and remote solutions, and the concept of “desktop” is replaced by a host of mobility enhancing interfaces ranging from PDA’s and smart phones to laptops and very thin clients.  Combine this technological revolution with the post-bubble revolution in attitude toward business spending, and IT departments are scrambling to create a service model which meets the needs of the emerging mobile, frugal user whose expectation is for near perfect availability of all their applications - all the time, wherever they might be.

Thankfully, meeting the conflicting demands of users and CFO’s is facilitated by the emergence of a maturing set of technologies for remote management and support.  Over the coming months and years we expect traditional desk-side IT support to become more and more like the Doctor’s house call which seems so quaintly anachronistic and inefficient today.  Remote diagnosis, standardized images, web-based applications, and ubiquitous wireless access combine with improved knowledge bases, standardized user interfaces, and increasing user sophistication to create the possibility of a support model using far fewer IT personnel, and delivering far faster turn-around of support issues as demanded by today’s end user.

This month we are pleased to share with you three perspectives on how this revolution is playing out in the real world.  The first is an interview with Jonathan Hiller, CIO of The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.  Mr. Hiller’s organization consists of 60 IT people supporting 1800 users in an environment where the word “deadline” has real meaning.  In his wide-ranging conversation with Taos, Hiller describes his challenges and opportunities in re-shaping IT for an organization that has been around since the 1800’s, but is now very much a part of the 21 st century.  Mr. Hiller discusses changes the Chronicle is implementing in their support model – moving to a more centralized approach, flattening the IT issue escalation hierarchy, and recognizing opportunities to improve self-help and how that ties in with user education and available tools.  And he discusses the Chronicle’s utilization of technology such as iCommand for automated, remote system management that dramatically reduces the amount of work needed, while increasing the reliability of the result. 

On November 9, Sun Microsystems’ new Senior VP and CIO, Bill Vass, addressed a group of Taos clients as part of our Experts in the Industry series. Vass, whose user community numbers more than 30,000 highly mobile knowledge workers, is perfectly positioned to provide a rigorous test case for Sun’s ambitious claims for their “ultra-thin” Sun Ray client and Java technologies. For this newsletter, Mr. Vass shares some thoughts about “Session Mobility”, in which Java badges replace passwords and allow a user to re-connect to a login session from a variety thin clients anywhere – changing the concept not only of desktop support, but of  one’s physical office and desk itself.  At Sun, thousands of workers are liberated from their desks more transparently and securely than they would be by carrying laptops around. Vass’s view is that network technology is at a tipping point – the race having now begun to connect and automate everything of value using technologies such as Java and RFID.  This will have far-reaching implications for IT and the Data Center, as millions of consumers are enjoying the benefits of what Vass has called “the Java lifestyle”.

Finally, Taos’s Professional Services group contributes an important article about the shift from “Desktop Support” to “End user Services.”  The article, written by our Director of Technical Services, Brandon Nutter, surveys both the technical drivers of change, such as smartphones, VPN concentrators, 802.11i and EAP, and also the organizational changes necessary to benefit from these technologies. Nutter points out that the gating factor on technological changes is often not the technology – it’s the organizational change that goes hand-in-hand with user acceptance, buy-in and understanding of the purpose and benefit of that technology.  This article discusses some of the issues in bringing about the organizational change necessary to realize the benefits of improved, and more cost effective, end-user support.

This month marks 15 years since Taos first began providing IT support to our customers.  We believe strongly that a holistic approach which integrates technology and organizational change can provide exceptional improvements in both quality and cost of IT service delivery.  Nowhere is this more the case than with end-user support services. If you would like to discuss how we might help your organization realize these astounding benefits, feel free to contact me, Ric Urrutia, directly at (408) 588-1200, or at ric@taos.com.

Sincerely,

Ric Urrutia

CEO & Co-Founder

Alexis Tatarsky

Co-Founder

Taos

"delivering excellence in IT”