What is desktop engineering?

Desktop engineering - which happens to be my day job until I start getting mega-thousands of hits a day on this blog ;-) - is the act of engineering the desktop (duh).

No seriously, what it means is to give as much thought to planning and building the desktop environment as you might to, say, the server environment or the network. By desktop, I mean the computers and peripherals that end users actually touch, like Dell Latitudes with Windows XP, and HP printers down the hall.

Why would you want to do this? Think about a small business. First, the owner and sole employee might buy one computer. Maybe he goes out to Dell and buys their cheapest underpowered machine (not such a good deal, until you add memory to it) because they have onsite support (a pretty good deal). Then he hires a few employees, and they all need computers. Maybe he still buys from Dell, but now they are different models and have different bundled software. Now he hires some more employees, and TigerDirect has good deals on refurbished eMachines this week. The owner hasn't ever used Dell's support, so he's thinking to save a few bucks and gets the eMachines. The eMachines have even more differences than the second round of Dells.

Who supports all of this? If a hard drive crashes and you have to rebuild it, what software is it licensed to have? How do you rebuild it? If the machine of a critical worker is down, can she move to another machine and be productive? What if Specialized Software #1 works on the eMachines and not the Dells - how do you figure out why that is?

This kind of inconsistency might be tolerable in a small business of 20-50 employees. But what if you have thousands or tens of thousands of employees? In this case, it makes business sense to spend the effort to reduce the complexity of the desktop environment. Preventing the kind of mess described above is the justification for desktop engineering.

Desktop engineering is the set of activities that strive to create a broadly used baseline desktop environment that is consistent and verified.

In a later post I'll explain this definition a little more.