Deploying Google Apps could be a "career-limiting move for enterprise architects," according to a new Burton Group report. That's like saying it is a CLM for an architect to quote Burton's research instead of Gartner's. It's comparing a specialist to a generalist.
If you want a career-enhancing move, take to your CIO an estimate of 75% of your Office users - those who don't use pivot tables, macros and other advanced features. Calculate the savings of not moving them to Vista and Office 2007. And potential savings from buying them more basic PCs with much less storage and compute power. And the savings from not downloading thousands of bug patches on their machines every year. Finally, sign up for a bunch of "phantom" Google Apps users. That should earn you a nice bonus as well. At $ 50 a user a year, use the 10GB of storage each qualifies for and negotiate down the storage your current outsourcer is charging $ 50 a month for.
Two other questions for Burton: how about Google's recent packaging of StarOffice? And if not Google, how about Zoho and other apps being showcased at Office 2.0 in a couple of weeks?
