On one hand, the design and implementation of personal computers offer users a great degree of freedom and flexibility. On the other hand, the PC’s proliferation throughout organizations has resulted in premature gray hair for many IS professionals at those organizations. As with many products, the usage envisioned by the creator of any piece of hardware or software can be quite different from how the customer actually uses the product. For example, other than holding sheets of paper together, what can you do with a paper clip? I’ve used paper clips to unlock a bathroom door when one of my kids tried to hide, to remove a 3.5-inch disk from a Macintosh computer, as a fishhook for a kids’ carnival game, and as a tie to hold together parts of my lawnmower’s handle. As the old saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Necessity, along with curiosity, creativity, a wide range of choices, and a little bit of knowledge, has pushed the limits of the personal computer and created an ever-expanding and almost uncontrollable job for the IS professional. In the “old days,” an IS professional would connect a terminal to a minicomputer or mainframe and then not touch the terminal for years. Applications and user accounts would be deployed and maintained centrally on the server. But even in those good old days, IS professionals needed to know what they were doing, since most of the available applications were not particularly intuitive and required a fair amount of support until users became proficient.
The freedom offered by PCs, along with users’ curiosity, creativity, and choice, has made life difficult for IS professionals.
In today’s computing environment, a combination of new and old computing models that leverage user-interface advances and bring back the old model of mainframe computing can help IS professionals do their jobs. The “Using Terminals at Citrix” sidebar looks at one aspect of application deployment and product evolution that occurred within Citrix Systems.
Users just want to get the job done; they don’t care how the computer works.
Most computing environments are mixed. The thin-client/server model combines ease of use for users and single-point management for network administrators.