Earlier this month it was announced that the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the public/private hybrid agency that replaced the Department of Commerce, purchased 73 iPads for a total of about $60,000, which includes activation fees and monthly data plans. Not sure if that includes anything else like Bluetooth keyboards or not.
A couple days ago Ryan Waal editorialized against the move over at The Daily Cardinal saying, essentially, that surely the state could have gotten a better deal on some laptops. He rightly points out that one of Governor Walker's mantra's is "We're broke."
Waal is angry that the taxpayer footed the bill for the devices but he misses a crucial point. The issue really isn't how much we paid upfront for those iPads, but rather what the Total Cost of Ownership or TCO is going to be on them. In other words, how much is the taxpayer going to pay for those devices over their lifespans? For example, you can buy an inkjet printer dirt cheap but that doesn't represent the TCO because you're going to be buying ink for years at $30+ a pop. The TCO of that printer is going to be the purchase price, the cost of ink refills as well as paper, and any money you spend maintaining it. Do you have to call HP and pay to get some tech support for the device? Well, that's part of the TCO too.
As far as these iPads go, I will admit up front that I have never touched one and have never spoken to anyone who deals with them in the enterprise. That caveat aside, taxpayers should be weary. I presume that money will be spent to deploy the iPads. Money would have also been expended to deploy laptops but is going to a new device and new OS going to increase those costs? Do all the users now have to have iTunes in order to get their device going? Will the WEDC infrastructure inherited from DOC have to be modified? Will new applications have to be written to work with Safari? (Is Safari on an iPad a mobile version?) Will new apps have to be purchased so that WEDC users can read and manipulate PDFs and MS Office files? Are they going to have to pay new license fees to Microsoft? What happens if a user loses the device? Does the iPad have some native system for WEDC IT to wipe it remotely or will a third party app have to be purchased to ensure that all those secret documents about luring mom and pop stores from Rockford to Beloit aren't compromised? To the best of my knowledge, iPads cannot join domains so how are they going to be managed? Do new IT people have to be hired? Or will the current staff be trained? Will iPads affect any long-term IT plans for the agency?
Tom Thieding, WEDC's spokesman, is quoted in the above article as saying, "There was a need for a technology upgrade…The old Department of Commerce - it was just lumbering along." OK, fine, but that doesn't mean that iPads are the solution. They may be or they may not be. What I get out of Thieding's comments is that the iPads were the cheapest solution in upfront costs but not necessarily the best solution in terms of either total cost or of fitting into the current IT environment.
IT staffs should keep an eye on this. According to one vendor, while various WI state agencies have bought the occasional iPad for executive staff, no agency has done a rollout like this one.
So the issue for the people of the great broke state of Wisconsin isn't whether WEDC could have gotten 73 laptops for less than $60,000, it's whether the TCO of 73 iPads is less than that of 73 laptops, tablets, or some combination thereof and, because, quite frankly, this whole thing just doesn't sound right, whether or not WEDC employees will be able to do their jobs effectively with the iPads.
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