Small Business - IT Management Advice

[hupjack]

I'm a tech savvy 30 year old engineer working at a solar power installation firm in California. I'm from silicon valley, have worked in high tech, and am fairly tech savvy.

I have historically kept my personal machine running smoothly choosing to reformat the thing once every 2 years or so. Today I mostly use a mac for personal computing, and my old PC tower just sits.

With that background I would like to introduce my conundrum at work and solicit some advice.

Many of my coworkers have very poorly running laptops. I know they have very capable hardware, but they run like dogs, some literally take 10 minutes to boot windows XP. Mine is not that bad, since I reformatted it.

My company is 65 people in three offices and likely to be over a 100 by the end of Q4 2009. (We were over 100 before the economy melted down).

We currently pay for an outsourced IT service, that responds on demand to requests for help.

I think they should be able to "re-image" a computer on demand..
I think every user at my company should have a responsive computer that boots pretty quickly and can run a web browser, a word processor, and a few other basic apps simultaneously and quickly..

This currently isn't the case.

I wonder if this is typically a problem with small businesses that don't have dedicated internal IT support staff.

I want to proposed a solution to make this better.

my thoughts
1) re-image problematicly slow machines. Backup data, re-imagage.. restore data
2) I think IT support visits to each office to "clean up" jacked computers and respond in person to IT issues is important, and 100% remote service just doesn't cut it.

I could personally serve as the IT guy, but it's not my role in the company, and it pains me to see the business struggle because IT just isn't working as well for the company as it should! the inefficiency and frustration it causes is clear.

Seems like there has to be a way to do better.

Looking forward to any advice anybody can offer!

[ua549]

I don't think the problem is one of re-imaging a machine on demand. It is an issue of controlling what happens to the machine once it is issued to an employee. Are they allowed to install their own software? Remove software? I their an automatic defragmentation program such a Diskeeper installed?

By configuring a company machine with the necessary software and then locking it down, you'll find that most of the performance issues never arise.

BTW - I have never had to re-image a machine for performance purposes.

[hupjack]

I while back, when the outsourced IT management company was first brought on, our machines were more locked down..

nobody had admin privileges to install software on their own computer. while I appreciated the importance of this, as a power user, i've always been granted permissions by IT firms at other companies so that I can customize my environment with XP powertoys, install google chrome etc.

I think most of the company has the ability to install software.. I don't think most people install crap.. I think the computers have all just been in use for so long that they've started to run like dogs.

Do you disagree that after 2-4 years of just general operating, most wintel boxes start running substantially slower for whatever reason, and a reformat speed them up substantially? Had zero software been installed / updated over those years, I'm sure the machines would be happier..

At this pt, I just want my fellow employees computers not to all suck.. I personally want to refresh everybody's machines so that they serve us well as productivity tools and not a frustrating unstable time suck.

I feel like many of them at this pt should be re-imaged, and probably people need their admin privileged revoked.

When software that we SHOULD all get though comes out, how does not having software install privileges work? Many programs update themselves... Chrome does full self program updates.. a firefox updates plugins..

would all of the "in app" auto-update processes get rejected by the logged in user not having admin / install rights? Probably a relatively small negative, but I recall personally having a computer at one point or another, where programs were trying to auto-update themselves over the web, and get tripped up by the user not having install privleges.

[ua549]

I understand your point about updates. I disagree that wintel machines start running slower after a period of time "just because". I've never encountered that problem at any of my client sites even though the equipment was near its 4 year end-of-life.

In most companies with more than 50 users, it has been my experience that IT personnel (in house or out sourced) controlled all updates and software versions. That way they could be tested and qualified before being pushed out to the users when they log into the server.

That said, I understand your concern. Re-imaging with media unique to each pc can solve performance issues at the expense having high overhead including the need to reapply all updates since the image was created. If the installed equipment base is homogeneous or nearly so, then a set of master images can be created and kept current as software updates are implemented. Users could update their pc from an image stored on the server.

I suggest a comprehensive review of IT policies, standards and procedures. Inconsistent software updates can be problematic for an organization. Another point that has a bearing on how to proceed is if the PC's are viewed as personal machines or if they are interchangeable with user specific files stored on a server.