Technical Note: Desktop Management in Practice

Desktop management is the set of activities employed to manage distributed IT resources within an organization. Reports from the late 1990s indicated that desktop management was not widely used. This article presents the results of a survey about the extent to which desktop management functions and policies are currently implemented in practice and about the perception of the benefits of desktop management. The primary conclusion of this technical note is that desktop management, despite moderately favorable perceptions of its benefits, is still not extensively implemented. However, when our data are evaluated relative to earlier reports, it appears that the level of implementation increased somewhat between 1998 and 2002.