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By Nancy Cox
Building a Corporate Testing Lab
Corporations are realizing that it takes significant time and labor to orchestrate major, enterprise-wide improvements in their computing environment, such as an operating system upgrade or the implementation of a new messaging system. These deployments take months of planning and evaluation, piloting and production transition. In addition, the process requires dedicated hardware and software, expert evaluators and management supervision. How can a company reduce the costs, personnel requirements and time to perform major upgrades and implementations? By ramping up a corporate test lab. Many companies are funding in-house testing facilities and deploying virtual action teams to quickly and efficiently make the changes the corporation needs to thrive in an increasingly competitive and demanding global economy.
A corporate test lab is chartered to evalua te emerging technologies in support of an organization's business goals. The lab contains the hardware, software, communications and personnel required to evaluate products and services deemed beneficial for corporate deployment. Companies save money and time, keep knowledge in-house, improve ties with vendors for the newest versions, get faster technical support, perform beta tests and provide input to product developers to improve their product offerings.
Most companies have developed standards for workstations, servers, communications equipment, office software and so on. Companies have had to do this to control support and maintenance costs and to provide better on-site service to end users. For example, the typical desktop might be a Pentium Pro PC running Windows95 and Microsoft Office, and connected to the corporate LAN via TCP/IP. The components of this list of standard products will be those running in the lab. Any new products, upgrades, fixes or new releases will be evaluated against all the other products on the standard products list to ensure interoperability and backward compatibility. Evaluations can be specific to one application-- such as a Human Resources database search engine--or applicable to the entire corporation--such as a Web browser, a digital certificate service or a high-speed color laser printer.
The lab also can be used as an internal resource center, a place where interested users can come to test new hardware and software before recommending its purchase. For example, you might be tasked with finding a new hand-held PC for your company's executives. Several brands could then be brought into the lab and evaluated against all the standard products that the executives use before narrowing the list to a few models that meet the executive's requirements. Thus, a more informed purchasing decision would be made in a shorter amount of time.
Several steps are required to get the lab established and fully functional. You'll need to fund the construction of the lab; choo se the lab personnel; select and procure the hardware, software and communications resources; build processes for conducting evaluations, purchasing and promotion; and manage the lab effectively on a daily basis.
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