Our investigation reveals that individuals in higher education and medical institutions have long valued personal choice and academic freedom. The increased deployment of distributed computing technology and its support, combined with the continued restraint of the Department of Family Medicine budgets that must reflect this new expanding cost, have caused institutions to realize that they must improve their return on investment in technology purchases and support costs.
As with many medical/educational institutions, the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster? University has a mixed environment comprised of multiple versions of multiple applications from numerous vendors running on various hardware and operating system platforms.
These definitely bring about a rising demand for support and the costs of maintaining such a heterogeneous environment are driving total cost of ownership upward.
The IT department has brought forth these recommendations for IT standards. It is our belief that by conforming to appropriate IT standards, the following benefits will be realized: