In 2003, the new CIO at Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), a New Jersey-based utility company, stepped up to address a credibility gap in the company's perception of IT performance. The company's management of personal computers for approximately 10,500 employees in facilities throughout the United States was fragmented across multiple groups with a mix of processes, control systems and resources. The department had not operationally integrated processes, which created overlap, duplication of effort, and confusion on the part of end users. The situation impacted user productivity, increased support costs, and made the work environment vulnerable to security risk.
PSEG had many different kinds of PCs of different ages and on different operating systems. It couldn't upgrade to new virus protection because the new codes took up more memory than the old PCs could support. Deploying new PCs took up to nine months, and by the time they deployed some PCs, they were already one year into a three-year warranty.
The CIO decided to rationalize -- yet also optimize -- the company's IT spend.
