WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT

Transformative Journeys in
Desktop Management
An approach to successfully planning and implementing fundamental
changes to the desktop infrastructure that will enhance and optimize the
delivery of end-user access to applications and productivity tools.
NOVEMBER 2009

Stephen Tyler
SERVICE MANAGEMENT
 Table of Contents

Executive Summary 1

Section 1: INTRODUCTION 2
Change is the Only Constant
Desktop Disaggregation
Windows 7 Migration
Adding It All Up

SECTION 2:
Desktop Management: Changing the Thinking  7

SECTION 3:
Define the Service Delivery Model  8
Service Value
Resources Consumed
Service Scorecard

SECTION 4:
Plan and Execute Change 10

SECTION 5:
How CA Can Help 10

SECTION 6:
About the Author 10

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Executive Summary
Challenge
Through desktop management today, IT provides value to corporate users in the form of access
to the information, applications, and productivity tools they need to do their jobs. This value has
been traditionally delivered by IT issuing desktop and laptop devices to the corporations’ users and
managing their configuration and lifecycle.

However, IT is under pressure from the business on a number of fronts. There is pressure to better
enable workforce mobility, leverage employee- and contractor-owned devices, more effectively
prevent data leaks from client devices, and reduce costs. In short, the business is demanding
higher value in the form of a workspace service that users can access from any device: a service
that is user-centric, device-aware, location-aware, and highly cost effective.

Several new technologies (both available and maturing) are combining to enable IT to respond
to these pressures. But they will also fundamentally transform the infrastructure involved in the
delivery of a service and have significant implications on how services are managed. In addition,
organizations are facing the first major client OS refresh in a decade: Windows 7.

Projects to adopt these various technologies, individually and in combination, truly represent
transformative journeys for IT. What to do first, how to minimize risk, how to ensure user
acceptance of the changes—a challenge indeed!

Opportunity and Benefits

The opportunities and benefits to be gained from successfully navigating these various
transformative journeys are significant, leading to increased service levels at lower costs than
otherwise possible.

This paper outlines the key technologies and their associated benefits and challenges, then
highlights the interconnectedness of the ROI and value propositions for several. It suggests a
service management approach to assessing, planning, prioritizing, executing, and evaluating these
transformations to ensure that the potential benefits are actualized and sustained through time.

Conclusion
• By focusing on the service level delivered to end users via client infrastructure and client
management today, and understanding the full and true cost of delivering IT, enterprises can
better plan and manage transformational change that delivers real incremental value to the
business and increased return on the investment in IT.
• Focusing on managing the “workspace service” and not just the device infrastructure has never
been as important as it is today, as enterprises prepare to accommodate increased diversity in
the infrastructure and support new delivery paradigms for the user experience.

WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT   1

Section 1: Introduction
Change is the Only Constant
The business value of IT providing and managing desktop, laptop, and mobile client devices
is that these devices provide a user workspace through which the users gain access to
information, applications, and productivity tools they need to do their job.

Historically, the provision of these workspaces has been largely accomplished by giving each
user a very powerful device—in the form of a laptop or desktop—and then configuring and
managing it. In essence, user workspace management has been largely reduced to client
device management.

However, IT is under pressure from the business on a number of fronts. There is pressure to
better enable workforce mobility, leverage employee- and contractor-owned devices, more
effectively prevent data leaks from client devices, and reduce costs. In short, the business is
demanding higher value in the form of a user workspace service that users can access from any
device: a service that is user-centric, device-aware, location-aware, and highly cost effective.

Responding to these pressures will drive significant changes for IT. For instance, new desktop
infrastructure alternatives are appearing that make it increasingly attractive to disaggregate
the desktop. Rather than delivering all of the rich user experience from a single device,
components of the workspace are instead sourced from a variety of more cost-efficient and
more easily managed sources in the datacenter and the cloud.

As a result of desktop disaggregation, IT is going to need to concern itself much more actively
with the direct provisioning and business benefit of the user workspace. Organizations will
need to leverage a web of infrastructure and applications to composite and manage the user
workspace experience, instead of just configuring and managing monolithic devices.

In addition to infrastructure disruption, organizations also face the first major client OS refresh
in a decade, in the form of Windows 7.

These significant changes are transformative journeys (collectively and individually) because they are
not simply incremental changes to how devices and endpoints are managed, but truly transformative
in the way the user experience is provided and managed. Most enterprises will at least be considering
embarking on one or more of these journeys (if they have not already begun one).

Many of these changes will increase the complexity of management simply because the
resulting infrastructure will have so many more moving parts that need to be orchestrated.
However, other management functions like OS and application patch management, user
data backup, and data leak prevention should become simpler. Almost everything will be
significantly different.

This white paper discusses a number of the technologies in play and suggests an approach to
successfully navigating the transformation from device management to workspace management.

2  WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT

Desktop Disaggregation

uses a device

Presentation
Persona
Client Apps
Client HW / OS

Thick clients

Traditional desktops and laptops concentrate a lot of capability in a single box. They provide
the user with access to applications and productivity tools by combining the power of the
desktop hardware, operating systems (OS), client applications, and user persona (data,
settings and preferences) in a single—and in the case of laptops, portable—package.

This has worked well for many years. But now, just as vertically integrated manufacturing
factories disaggregated into more efficient supply chains in years past, the desktop is now
disaggregating. Its various components are increasingly sourced from a variety of more
efficient locations and composited at the point of access.

Now there are many ways to provide the core desktop hardware and OS, many ways to
provide access to the required client applications, and many ways to overlay the individual’s
persona (in the form of OS and application configuration settings and user data).

As soon as any of these technologies are leveraged, the infrastructure becomes complex,
with some pieces of the workspace delivered locally, while others are sourced from the
datacenter or cloud.

In pure desktop virtualization (hosted virtual desktops), the device may be a simple thin
client that accesses a workspace via a connection broker that composites the various
datacenter/cloud-resident components. This is attractive in that it fully centralizes the
desktop management problem—and the workspace can be accessed by any device over an
appropriate display protocol. This is appropriate for some classes of users but not all.

In many cases, including offline work or high-performance client applications, the need will
remain for some applications to run locally on client devices. Consequently the real workspace
composition must occur at the point of access, rather than the edge of the datacenter.
Therefore, while connection brokers are part of the datacenter-resident desktop infrastructure
ecosystem, they are not the full solution to workspace management.

WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT  3

 Network

uses a device Datacenter / Cloud Sourced Services

Connection Broker —
Access to Workspace /
Workspace Components
Presentation
Persona Client Apps
Persona
Client Apps
Client HW / OS

Client HW / OS Persona /
Workspace Mgmt
Hosted App
Virtualization

Thick clients
Blade Terminal Hosted Virtual VDI and
PCs Servers Desktops (VDI) Workspace Storage

There is now also the expectation from the business that a user’s workspace experience no
longer be tied to a specific device, as mobile and employee-owned devices increasingly enter
the fray and further complicate the ecosystem of workspace-related infrastructure.

The net effect of these changes is that the user is no longer using a client device but consuming a
service. IT must likewise change from managing client devices to providing the workspace service.

Providing the workspace service requires that IT understand what different users need from
their workspace experience and leverage any and all of the underlying infrastructure to meet
those needs intelligently. It also requires IT to manage the workspace service against a service
level and cost per user.

Network

consumes a service Datacenter / Cloud Sourced Services

Device-aware, location-aware
workspace access, plus self-service
provisioning and management

Workspace Connection Broker —

Service Access to Workspace /
Workspace Components
Provide Required
Service Level to
Users at Best Cost Persona Client Apps
per User

$
Client HW / OS Persona /
Workspace Mgmt
Hosted App
Virtualization

Blade Terminal Hosted Virtual VDI and

Thick Thin Mobile and Employee- PCs Servers Desktops (VDI) Workspace Storage
clients clients owned Devices

4  WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT

Workspace management is therefore about applying an understanding of the underlying
infrastructure both inside and outside of the datacenter together with an understanding of
the user’s entitlements, to provide the workspace at the point of access in a way that is both
identity-aware and context-aware (device and network characteristics, location, time of day).

In order to appropriately provision users’ entitlements, mature workspace management

solutions use rule-based evaluation at the point and time of access to factor in information
about the capabilities and trust level of both the access device and the network. For instance,
rules may be used to ensure that certain sensitive applications are only made available in
the users’ workspace when they are accessing it from a trusted network. This can be an
important part of implementing an Information Governance or Data Leak Prevention policy.

In the aggregate, these technology changes can combine to produce significant benefits with
regards to capability, agility, cost, risk, and quality of service. On the other hand, they come at
the price of increased complexity, demanding careful management, planning, and orchestration.

Windows 7 Migration
Against the backdrop of all these transformative infrastructure changes, most organizations
are also facing another transformative journey: migration to Windows 7.

Windows 7 is the main “must do” desktop initiative for which most organizations are currently
planning. With most enterprises having skipped the Vista release of Windows, it has now
been nearly a decade since the last major upgrade was undertaken. Consequently, many of
the IT professionals who will be responsible for Windows 7 migration were not there the last
time an upgrade was done.

Major, large-scale desktop OS upgrades are not simple. The logistics of actually performing
the OS upgrade are relatively straightforward, but ensuring that the desktop hardware is
compatible and that the upgrade does not break any applications on which the business
depends is not a trivial exercise.

Let’s consider hardware first. The minimum specification required for Windows 7 is higher
than that for Windows XP. This fact alone means that most organizations will be facing at least
a partial hardware refresh in preparation for the Windows 7 rollout. When XP was rolled out,
it was largely a case of replacing older desktops with new ones or upgrading components like
memory. But this time there are other options to consider, such as deploying various forms
of desktop virtualization and moving to thin client devices which may be more attractive than
buying new desktops (either on the basis of cost or manageability). This may lead organizations
to at least partially deploy desktop virtualization technologies before rolling out Windows 7.

Microsoft goes to great lengths to facilitate application compatibility by working with ISVs to
certify their applications against the new OS; most ISVs will issue necessary patches. However,
each organization will need to ensure it has a thorough inventory of deployed applications and a
plan in place for ensuring and validating that they will all continue to work after the OS upgrade
and, if necessary, get patched either before or with the OS upgrade. Even then, ISV-supplied
applications are only part of the story; most enterprises have a large number of home grown
applications in use, some of which may have not been actively developed for many years.

WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT  5

 The ability to run XP in a locally-hosted virtual machine in order to run non-Windows 7
compatible applications on the Windows 7 desktop provides an additional option that may help
navigate problems when those patches that are needed to address compatibility issues are not
available. This is helpful, but it is yet another variable for IT to consider in the migration planning
exercise, not a silver bullet.

Again, as with hardware remediation, new technologies may also play a role in preparing for
the Windows 7 rollout. For instance, hosted application virtualization can provide an effective
way to ensure continuity and availability of older applications that are business critical but
not compatible with Windows 7. Rather than investing in custom development to remediate
the legacy application, it may be more cost effective to start a project to entirely replace it,
and buy the time to do that by deploying it via hosted application virtualization to allow the
Windows 7 upgrade to proceed.

The point worth stressing here is that the planning and execution for the Window 7 upgrade
is interdependent with the planning and execution for adopting a new desktop infrastructure.
Further, Windows 7 may actually be more than just a migration, but the opportunity and a
trigger point to rethink the delivery of the user workspace service.

Adding It All Up
The intent of the above discussion was not to exhaustively address all the issues germane to
planning and undertaking these transformations, but to paint a broad picture of the transformative
change that is coming, driven by sound business imperatives, enabled by emerging technology,
and heralding massive upheaval for IT as it goes through the process of adopting these changes
and actualizing the benefits. The discussion was also meant to highlight a few examples of the
interconnectedness of business cases and ROIs for these transformations.

Certainly the benefits these changes will deliver in combination are compelling. They enable a
future in which:
• Users
¬¬ get a consistent workspace experience regardless of device or location
¬¬ no longer need separate devices for their personal and work lives
• IT
¬¬ can provide the user experience at a higher service level and lower cost than
currently possible
¬¬ can deliver improved information and network security

This is clearly a highly desirable destination but there are no direct flights. The remainder of
this paper suggests an approach to planning a route.

6  WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT

SECTION 2: Desktop Management: Changing the Thinking
The previous section outlined technological changes in the way the user workspace is
delivered. But what does that mean for the management process?

First, IT needs to start thinking less about desktop management as an end in and of itself. Instead,
organizations need to think more about the wider context of providing a “Workspace Service.” The
quality and cost of the workspace service is what the business ultimately cares about.

This is a mindset shift, but it is also more than that. Adopting Workspace Service Management
as a paradigm involves understanding and documenting the benefits to the service consumer,
the required service level, the infrastructure and other services it is dependent on, and the full
costs of providing the service at the required service level. The full cost of providing the service
is a lot more than just the TCO of a desktop; it includes appropriate allocation of all relevant
management and overhead costs.

With that understanding in place as a baseline, large potential changes to the service delivery
model can be evaluated to ensure that alignment with the business requirements for the
service is not compromised and that the benefits can be quantified and managed in terms of
KPIs and metrics for the workspace service.

For instance, let’s apply workspace-service thinking to the challenge of adopting a technology
like Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD or VDI). The technology certainly seems to offer an
attractive value proposition: centralizing the management and security of desktop resources
combined with the resource optimization benefits of datacenter virtualization and automation.

However, enterprises are approaching deployments quite tentatively. The two primary reasons for
this include concerns about the upfront costs and the technology performance/user experience.

The performance and user experience of HVD infrastructure is becoming less of an inhibitor
as the technology and display protocols are improving all the time. For many user classes
and physical environments, performance and user experience have already surpassed “good
enough” and continue to improve.

The upfront costs break down into two key areas:

• Acquisition cost of infrastructure and software licenses
• Management process/policy creation and automation

The full infrastructure and storage costs are certainly significant for large scale HVD deployments.
However, there are ways to mitigate this issue. Initial trial deployments at a relatively low scale
(hundreds not thousands) can often be undertaken without incurring large upfront expense by utilizing
and extending datacenter server virtualization and automation solutions that are already deployed.
In many cases it will make sense to defer further upfront costs by slowly expanding initial small-scale
trial deployments over time, transitioning physical desktops to virtual desktops at the next hardware
refresh cadence—in many cases, extending the life of existing client devices by repurposing them as
thin clients which are, in turn, replaced by dedicated thin clients when they can no longer serve their
purposes. Software licensing is a real issue; some software vendors license their products in ways that
are not particularly friendly towards virtualized deployments, especially pooled ones where machines
are not permanently assigned to named users. Combined, these issues may drive a slower transition
from physical to virtual infrastructure over the course of two to five years (rather than large-scale
switchovers), but should not ultimately inhibit adoption of the technology.
WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT  7
 The need to create entirely new management processes and policies to manage the HVD
infrastructure and software license consumption is often overlooked. The discovery of these
costs during trial deployments can cause HVD project deferment, as organizations conclude
the actual cost is going to be a lot more expensive than originally anticipated. However, it is
also true that ongoing management costs of maintaining existing physical infrastructure are
often ignored when considering the ROI case for HVD adoption in the first place.

With a 360 degree workspace service view of existing environments’ performances and cost
characteristics, the fully loaded cost-per-user of providing the service at required service levels can
be calculated and contrasted with that projected for the proposed HVD alternative. Further, the
full service view is required to properly understand the proposed investment in terms of a project’s
impact on the full set of KPIs for the service, including (but not limited to) cost. CA believes that
such an understanding is critical to moving forward with desktop transformation projects.

SECTION 3: Define the Service Delivery Model

As with any IT service, defining the service delivery model involves articulating each service’s
value to the service consumer; the resources consumed to provide the service (infrastructure,
human resources, and downstream services); and a set of service KPIs against which a service
scorecard can be constructed to drive service delivery optimization over time.

Service Value
Ultimately, all IT services are provided to enable business operations or business strategy.
The service value definition should not only include what it is, but also why it matters.

In the case of the workspace service, it matters because it is the point of consumption of a
large proportion of all the services that IT provides and perhaps as importantly, the point of
consumption of all corporate information for which IT is responsible.

The service definition should articulate:

• The benefits to the user (e.g. information and application access from anywhere)
• The benefits to the business as a whole (e.g. employee productivity, information security,
data leak prevention, compliance assurance, etc)
• The required service level in terms of measurable KPIs

While much of this may seem obvious at a high level, it is important to articulate this as
completely as possible before embarking on any large changes in order to enable reliable
change impact assessment in terms of what actually matters to the service consumer (as
opposed to what may seem important to various IT stakeholders).

For the workspace service, it is worth breaking down the service value definition by user
group. Certainly the broad, often-cited groups of power users, knowledge workers, and task
workers require different benefits from the workspace service. Most organizations could
benefit from slightly greater granularity. Some transformative changes will make sense to
apply to some user groups, but not others. Further, the service delivery model should support
analysis that is not constrained by the assumption that one size fits all.

8  WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT

Resources Consumed
It is important to define the resources consumed to deliver a service in order to understand
how to allocate and aggregate performance and cost metrics from the component resources
to the service. It also supports impact assessment for any proposed changes to various
elements of the consumed resources.

Today, the desktop infrastructure required for the workspace service is relatively simple. Nonetheless,
there are many cost-driving components of the service delivery model, including helpdesk resources,
OS and application installation, patch management solutions, asset provisioning and lifecycle
management, backup solutions, power, equipment loss/theft, and the cost of enforcing and proving
compliance with information security and other aspects of corporate policy.

Without a true understanding of these dependencies and how to allocate the associated costs
to the service, there is no valid baseline against which to compare alternate strategies for
service delivery.

As transformative technologies are taken on board, the complexity of desktop infrastructures

will increase immensely. This will simplify some aspects of delivering and managing the
workspace service, but complicate others.

Service Scorecard
The QARCC (Quality, Agility, Risk, Capability, and Cost) metrics model provides a framework
for thinking about and defining service KPIs and metrics that matter to the business. In many
cases, quality, capability, and cost are the primary focus areas. For the workspace service,
relevant metrics include:
1. Quality: performance and availability of basic desktop employee productivity tools and key
applications
2. Agility: ability of infrastructure to expand/contract quickly to react to changing
levels of demand
3. Risk: Information Security compliance and Software License policies
4. Cost: cost-per-user for the service
5. Capability: how access is provided to applications and information to which the user is
entitled, the specific access point devices/contexts need to be/are being supported

The service definition should define how the relevant metrics will be gathered, aggregated,
and allocated to the service to provide accurate insight into the KPIs. This should drive a
service scorecard that is the focus of attention for the ongoing optimization and management
of the service delivery model. The scorecard should be the benchmark against which
application and infrastructure management tools can gather performance and availability
metrics and aggregate them to a service. IT financial management tools can be used to gather
service-related cost data from various sources and allocate them to a service.

WHITE PAPER: TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEYS IN DESKTOP MANAGEMENT  9

SECTION 4: Plan and Execute Change
So far, the discussion yields two main implications for the workspace service approach:
1. These transformation projects should be considered together in the context of a service
strategy that evaluates and prioritizes various transformative projects to maximize the
ROI on the individual investments. It should also maximize the collective investment in the
transformation as a whole by leveraging the synergies.
2. Use Strategic Change Management principles (e.g. ITIL V3 Service Transition Best Practice
Guidance) to plan and execute change to ensure that all changes to IT’s delivery of the
workspace service are not just “good ideas” for IT, but clearly aligned to the needs of the
business with success measured and proven in terms of the workspace service KPIs, (as
opposed to simply project-specific criteria).

A service strategy for the workspace service should understand the interdependence
between issues like Windows 7 and desktop virtualization. Further, it should consider them in
combination, rather than separate initiatives.

The objective of the service strategy should be to define and prioritize a series of projects to
improve and optimize the delivery of the service.

The benchmark for assessing the business case for all such projects is ultimately the service KPI
model. It may be that some projects are primarily justified by benefits of the cost dimension,
some by benefits to the risk/compliance dimensions, and others on a combination of the QARCC
metrics—but all projects will be measured and assessed by the yardstick of what matters to the
business, rather than technology-focused, project-specific ROIs, and business cases.

SECTION 5: How CA Can Help

CA has a wide range of expertise and product capability in both infrastructure management
and service management disciplines that can be leveraged as we partner with our customers
to help them transition from providing desktops to providing user workspaces, and from
managing client devices to managing the workspace service.

We invite all enterprise organizations contemplating the transformative journeys in desktop

management that lie ahead to explore how CA’s expertise and solutions can be leveraged to
help unlock the full potential of these exciting technologies—and to do so in a way that truly
delivers incremental value to the business.

SECTION 6: About the Author

Stephen Tyler is a product manager for CA’s Workspace Management Solution area, which
includes the CA IT Client Manager product set. He has 17 years of software development
experience, including several years as chief architect for CA’s Support Automation product,
and brings a deep perspective on the management and support of desktops in the enterprise.
He has an MBA and is ITIL foundation certified.

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