We not only get new computers, but also new monitors and new keyboards and new mice every 3-4 years or so. WHY on earth do we need to buy everything again and again and renew stuff that could easily be avoided for at least a decade? All that really needs to be renewed is the computing power for newer resource-hungry software. Can't this easily be done at a mainframe-common server level? After all, it will be a one-time investment for many employees - not a many-time investment for all the employees over and over. RPCI really needs to rethink it's IT strategy and look at this absolute waste of resources it's incurring all the time.
I recently read a lot about Drupal. The usefulness of a modular, dynamic Drupal-like system in a mainframe office would be immense. Content that employees would need to work with could be served dynamically on their monitors, depending on who has the verified credentials and pre-assigned rights/clearance (determined by who logs in at that terminal). And of course, when your work is done, you can't store stuff in your USBs or local storage - where they might easily get stolen or lost. As an added advantage, not having processors and hard-drives at every desk would also save energy and operating costs.
Health data is protected data. It's time we treated it in the same way as other professional organizations such as government secret services treat their files in their offices.
PS: This
is an article on how we went from a centralized big computer to many small computers. I think that it makes sense, especially where data security is concerned, to move back to the centralized serving, more powerful computing model. Personal computers have no place in a work environment.PPS: I am not doing justice to the magnitude of advantages of such a system. A few immediate and key advantages could be:
- Cost saving (in many ways; avoiding not only repeated costs for buying unnecessary peripherals, but also maintenance costs and energy costs)
- Energy saving
- Tougher and more efficiently administered data security
- Tidier offices and more deskspace
Yes, sadly, I know. I was just using Drupal as an example of the sort of framework that might be needed to make the whole concept work. Probably, something analogous to the Drupal system that serves up portions of the relevant OS to the end-users on their terminals. But then, you say Citrix does that already? And Citrix is the slowest drive-you-crazy interface I have encountered. :/
Oh well. Let's wait for the cloud cover to get to 90+%.
As for drupal, I think it is quite innefficient and its just a content management system not an OS.
This is the whole concept behind i2.
Everything is moving in that direction. Its the essence of cloud computing. Just look at google docs as an example. It probably wont be too long before it happens.
IT has already moved in that direction for servers with vmware.
Citrix which we already have is also like that. You are essentially running apps on the server and then piping them to your screen much like the old dumb terminal/ main frame environment of yesterday. In that case it's pretty much piping and entire windows desktop.
There are some problems with this.
0. I don't believe the technology is ready yet. If you use something like citrix you can see it is slower than a real app.
1. Convince the end users they don't need full PCs.
2. When there are network outages or slowdowns nobody can get anything done.
3. Heavy use of one part of the farm can affect others.