As an example, we went from 3 IT staff to 2 while growing four-fold in terms of services, servers, desktops and locations to manage.
It's certainly a complex issue, which is what I think you're alluding to. Mangement software, commonality of parts, architecture, etc all play big parts as well. We also have far fewer SPoF's today which makes fire drills less common. But to stay on topic, I get a lot more done since I am not constantly opening and closing things. I am also taking in more information simulaneously. When I troubleshoot or test, I can see the effects of what I am doing in several dimensions at once. When I code or write accounting reports, I still see my email, IM, the status of every PC at my location (we monitor not just disk and memory but services), etc. Try it on 1 or two desktops and see if it works for you. We started off in trading and accounting, then moved into IT and finally everyone else.
FWIW
We have been running multimonitor in our offices since Win3.11 days. We see a typical 20-40% productivity increase by adding a 2nd monitor. In fact there is not a single employee here who does not run at least duals. For some jobs it makes a lot of sense, for example accounting or coding. For equity traders it is essential. Our traders typically have 8 or 9 18" monitors running at a time (on 3 PC's) each is 1280x1024. Bigger firms I know of run up to 5 PC's per trader. Things like charts can easily be monitored from your peripheral vision while priority items and text based objects can be in direct view. I do the same thing as a tech person - I run 9 monitors and use them to keep my syslogs, Firewall logs, MRTG, etc in plain sight all the time. I know what's happening everywhere at once, and it cost very little in the scheme of things.
Think about it this way: you have tons of horsepower in your PC or Mac. The monitor is your only interface. Maximizing it only makes sense if you want to extract full value from it. Would you use your PC through a peephole? Yes there is a point of diminishing returns, but..
That said, I'd rather use pairs, triples or quads of monitors rather than one big one. It is easier to differenciate where each app is going since you have natural borders, it is less expensive and by adding a bracket system (like Ergotron) you can format them any way you want (4 in a row, 2 over 2, etc) try that with 1 screen.;)
For the bean counters, look at it this way:
Take an average salary of $35k
20% of salary is about $7k, divide by 12 and you get $583.33
- this is what the incr in productivity (at just 20%, and we often see higher) could be worth, per month.
We are assuming that you could either:
- have 20% fewer employees
- OR each employee you have could do 20% more things each day - and that there are things that could be done..
Your ROI could be literally 1 month. That's a good deal no matter how you slice it.
Bottom line: You can purchase a dual video card and a pair of 18" plasmas for less than this. We've been at it since 1996, and never looked back.
JM2C, YMMV, and the usual disclaimers apply..
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Not my intention to draw a definitive msft timeline. Simply stating what we used when we used it.
As an example, we went from 3 IT staff to 2 while growing four-fold in terms of services, servers, desktops and locations to manage. It's certainly a complex issue, which is what I think you're alluding to. Mangement software, commonality of parts, architecture, etc all play big parts as well. We also have far fewer SPoF's today which makes fire drills less common. But to stay on topic, I get a lot more done since I am not constantly opening and closing things. I am also taking in more information simulaneously. When I troubleshoot or test, I can see the effects of what I am doing in several dimensions at once. When I code or write accounting reports, I still see my email, IM, the status of every PC at my location (we monitor not just disk and memory but services), etc. Try it on 1 or two desktops and see if it works for you. We started off in trading and accounting, then moved into IT and finally everyone else.
FWIW We have been running multimonitor in our offices since Win3.11 days. We see a typical 20-40% productivity increase by adding a 2nd monitor. In fact there is not a single employee here who does not run at least duals. For some jobs it makes a lot of sense, for example accounting or coding. For equity traders it is essential. Our traders typically have 8 or 9 18" monitors running at a time (on 3 PC's) each is 1280x1024. Bigger firms I know of run up to 5 PC's per trader. Things like charts can easily be monitored from your peripheral vision while priority items and text based objects can be in direct view. I do the same thing as a tech person - I run 9 monitors and use them to keep my syslogs, Firewall logs, MRTG, etc in plain sight all the time. I know what's happening everywhere at once, and it cost very little in the scheme of things. Think about it this way: you have tons of horsepower in your PC or Mac. The monitor is your only interface. Maximizing it only makes sense if you want to extract full value from it. Would you use your PC through a peephole? Yes there is a point of diminishing returns, but.. That said, I'd rather use pairs, triples or quads of monitors rather than one big one. It is easier to differenciate where each app is going since you have natural borders, it is less expensive and by adding a bracket system (like Ergotron) you can format them any way you want (4 in a row, 2 over 2, etc) try that with 1 screen. ;)
For the bean counters, look at it this way:
Take an average salary of $35k
20% of salary is about $7k, divide by 12 and you get $583.33
- this is what the incr in productivity (at just 20%, and we often see higher) could be worth, per month.
We are assuming that you could either:
- have 20% fewer employees
- OR each employee you have could do 20% more things each day - and that there are things that could be done..
Your ROI could be literally 1 month. That's a good deal no matter how you slice it.
Bottom line: You can purchase a dual video card and a pair of 18" plasmas for less than this. We've been at it since 1996, and never looked back.
JM2C, YMMV, and the usual disclaimers apply..