The report is available in the US by calling 1-800-232-9335.
Objectives of the Study
Gartner Group Consulting Services examines IT technical support costs in medium
to large organisations. The key objective of this study was to
quantify the
effect on technical support costs of heterogeneity in end user computing
environments. The study sample size exceeded 312,000 desktop
computers. The
study aimed at providing answers to the following questions:
"Do dual-platform computing environments result in higher technical support
costs?"
And, if the answer to the first question is yes, "What are the main cost
drivers resulting in this technical support cost "premium" associated with
heterogeneous computing environments?"
In this study, Gartner Group surveyed over 65 enterprise IT organisations in
the US in mid 1995, evaluating existing technical support infrastructure and
costs. The study covered over 312,000 desktop computers. As such,
the study
includes varying mixes of Macintosh (up to and including Mac OS version 7.5.1)
and Windows based desktops (up to and including Microsoft version 3.11). The
study was concluded while Windows 95 was still in beta test. Gartner Group
says that while Windows 95 has minimally lower support costs than does Windows
3.x, there is nothing about Windows 95 that changes the fundamental
conclusions
of their study.
Background
Most organisations deploy desktop computers from several hardware vendors,
supporting both Macintosh and Windows. Gartner Group calls this "heterogeneous
computing" because there is so much diversity apparant at the desktop.
At the same time, IT organisations are often under budget pressure and are
called on to reduce the costs of supporting the overall organisation without
regard to any benefits of dual-platforms to end users. This has led some IT
organisations to evaluate the single platform challenge: would an all-Windows
environment have lower IT technical support costs than a dual
platform one?
The common wisdom is that initial installations of a technology bear a
larger portion of the support costs and, as the technology proliferates,
support costs can be spread over a larger installed base, lowering the
incremental support cost of later units. Old erroneous beliefs were that
introduction of a second technology will dilute this economy of scale and
unavoidably make a dual-platform environment more expensive to support.
Furthermore, this effect will be present even if one of the technologies has
fundamentally lower support costs than the other.
Following is a "theoretical"
model of what such a dual-platform penalty region would look like. At one
extreme
is all Windows; at the other is all Macintosh. In the middle, the "hump," if
it exists, would represent the extra costs of being dual platform. Note that
Gartner Group did not find any such region in the data.
Effect of Windows 95
Gartner Group's major conclusion is that, while conventional wisdom might
suggest that standardisation on a single platform would lower technical support
expenses, there is no cost premium associated with supporting both Macintosh
and Windows. And, while the study was conducted prior to the public
release of
Windows 95, Gartner Group says that deployment of Windows 95 doesn't change the
fundamental conclusions of this study.
Gartner Group's Methodology
The principal methodology used was a survey conducted using one-to-one audio
teleconferencing interviews. Sixty-seven companies, all located in North
America, participated in the survey; the sample size exceeded 312,000 desktop
computers. The companies represented a wide range of industry sectors,
installed base sizes, and degrees of heterogeneity. The survey was supplemented
by a small number of audio teleconferences that were held with a subset of the
participant companies.
The data were gathered in mid-1995 and were not supplemented by data collected
during previous studies. Although a certain amount of filtering had to be
performed to eliminate responses that were incomplete, no attempt was made to
infer or reconstruct missing data. Technical support costs were equated with
full-time equivalent (FTE) technical support personnel. Gartner Group has
often found that personnel costs are the main determinant of technical support
costs, and furthermore, that it is usually quantifiable more accurately than
other cost elements. A number of different data analysis methods were used to
analyse the data, to accommodate the nonlinearity of some of the data.
Effect of Diversity on Support Costs
Gartner Group found that total technical support costs in 90% of the
enterprises surveyed fall below 0.025 FTEs/end user desktop. The most
remarkable feature of these data is that they do not show any deviation from
linearity: there is no "dual-platform penalty" region wherein the
technical
support costs are driven upward. Gartner Group concludes from this that dual
platform desktop standards (Macintosh and Windows) do not lead to detectable
increases in technical support costs.
Regression lines fit through the data tend downward to the right (100%
Macintosh). This confirms the frequently reported fact that Macintoshes
are less expensive to support than Windows systems (25% less in this
study) and
Gartner Group concludes that overall support costs decline as the
percentage of
Macintosh systems in the environment increases.
Effect of Support Quality
To investigate whether the differences between Windows and Macintosh costs were
due to differences in the quality of technical support, Gartner Group conducted
a pairwise comparison between Windows and Macintosh support costs in individual
enterprises. Gartner Group found that in most environments, and regardless of
the degree of Macintosh penetration, the Macintosh was less expensive to
support than Windows. Again, there is no visible effect due to mixing desktop
platforms.
A closer look at those few environments in which Macintosh technical support
costs exceed those for Windows reveals some of the critical cost drivers. The
use of problem resolution tools, for example, reduces Macintosh support costs,
as does the integration of these tools with network management tools. Also, the
use of multiple versions of the Macintosh operating system also increases
support costs.
Effect of Management Style
There are some environments that apparently do not have the same level of
management control as others. Gartner Group believes that these different
environments, which they characterise as tightly managed and
loosely managed, are responsible for the existence of two distinct
bands in the support cost data, separated by a factor of four, into which
the data cluster. After separating the data into these two groups,
Gartner Group found that one average technical support person can care
for about 95 Macintoshes or 77 Windows systems in tightly managed environments.
These ratios drop to 23 and 18, respectively, in loosely managed situations.
Average number of end users supported by one technical support person:
Tightly Managed Loosely Managed
Environments * Environments *
___________________ ________________________
Macintosh :
platform : 95 end users 23 end users
:
Windows :
platform : 77 end users 18 end users
* Not all environments experience the same level of management control.
Some are more successful than others at controlling technical support
costs. Gartner Group refers to these as "tightly managed" environments.
Best Use of Existing Windows Computers
Gartner Group also found that increased production-type use (e.g., terminal
emulation)
decreases support costs. This effect is particularly marked in the case of the
Windows systems, where, increasing terminal emulation usage from 0% to 100% can
reduce support costs by 50%. Gartner concludes that concentrating
existing Windows
systems in production-type use will reduce technical support costs.
Effect of Remote Backup
In a similar vein, Gartner Group found that sites with higher levels of remote
backup incur higher technical support costs. But this increase could be due as
much to the fact that the labor associated with local backups may be drawn from
the end user community itself and therefore not recorded in the study as would
centrally managed technical support. It is also possible, of course, that if
backups are not done remotely, with the help of formal technical support staff,
they don't get done at all.
Effect of End-User Training
One way to assess the validity of the unexpected results of this study is to
see if the same data can be used to confirm other, more familiar, observations.
For example, and in agreement with other studies, Gartner Group found that
while organisations that provide less than three days of end user training per
year frequently experience larger support costs, those that provide more than
three days per year see no further reduction in costs.
The survey data collected in this study do not allow assignment of cause and
effect. As an example, the data are clear that no installation with more than
about 5,000 units falls into the loosely managed category. But is it the case
that having more desktops reduces technical support costs? It could just as
readily be argued that unless tight management is practiced, organisations are
unable to grow to over 5,000 desktops. The data by themselves do not suggest
either one interpretation or the other.
Standardise at the Network and Application Layers
Most of Gartner Group's interviewees agreed that successful control of support
costs was made possible by managing diversity at two crucial architectural
layers: networking (file and print services) and applications. Although the
benefits to be achieved by the flexible use of multiple desktop systems have
long been felt, it was always believed that the costs of supporting such
environments made their use impractical. Gartner Group's observations indicate
that a significant number of enterprises have learned where to concentrate
their management efforts: it appears that they have learned to "manage their
way out" of the extra costs that have long been thought to result from such
arrangements. Whereas in the past, it was thought that to control these
extra costs
one should manage at the hardware on OS layers (that is, go single platform),
in this study Gartner Group found the companies would have success managing at
the network and application layers.
Windows Systems Inherently More Heterogeneous
Finally, Gartner Group concluded that in the real world, there really is no such
thing as being "single platform." Companies deploy multiple
generations of Windows platforms from several different hardware vendors. Thus,
even in the "pure" Windows shop, there are multiple add-in cards both from
vendors and from users, differing versions of device drivers, microprocessors
generations, differing BIOS, even differing x86 compatible microprocessor
vendors. Gartner Group concludes that "every environment is
heterogeneous, and
Windows environments are more heterogeneous than Macintosh environments."
Gartner Group Findings and Recommendations
Gartner Group's answers to the study objectives are as follows:
"Do dual-platform computing environments result in higher technical support
costs?"
No, there are no detectable extra support costs associated with having
both Macintosh AND Windows over and above having Windows alone.
And, if the answer to the first question is yes, "What are the main cost
drivers resulting in this technical support cost "premium" associated with
heterogeneous computing environments?"
Not Applicable
In order to reduce technical support costs, Gartner Group recommends the
following:
Train end users at least three days per year. This is the
single most immediate
thing you can do. Those companies who provided less than three days
training per
end user per year ran the risk of having significantly higher support costs.
Manage diversity
Use integrated network management and problem resultion tools.
Being well managed,
not surprisingly, leads to lower support costs.
Reduce the number of operating systems versions for a given
platform.
Deploying multiple versions
of a single operating system (both version 6.x and 7.x, for example) increases
the probability of higher support costs.
Redeploy existing Windows systems to production-type use.
The deployment of Windows systems for unfettered knowledge worker use
increases the risk of higher technical support costs. Redeploying these
systems
into heads-down, well-defined, production-style use (such as data entry)
reduces the risk that users of these Windows computers will generate
support calls,
thus reducing technical support costs.
Favor a higher percentage of Macintosh.
Macintosh has always been less expensive to support
than Windows systems. This study shows that in a mixed Macintosh/Windows
environment, costs can
be reduced by increasing the percentage of Macintosh deployed.
Manage at the network and application layers, rather than
standardising on the
hardware or OS.
The old wisdom of managing diversity at the hardware & OS layers
is no longer true; this study shows that costs can be driven out of support by
managing at the application layer and the network layer.
![[Theoretical Model]](theoretical.gif)
![[Graph of Effect of Diversity on
Technical Support Costs]](supportcosts.gif)
![[Effect of End User Training on Support
Costs]](training.gif)
![[Architectural model]](fivelayermodel.gif)
