[SAGE] Help! Multiple platforms in a Dell Shop

[Martin Jackson <martin@guyver.demon.co.uk>]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice or just maybe to vent generally, I'm not 
sure what.

I work in an organisation of just over 130 people with a support staff 
of 4 people, we're an EDA house and our corporate policy is that we 
purchase Dell machines (we know the hardware and have faily good 
relationships with our Dell account managers), the policy is documented 
but our Exec management continually flaunt it i.e. they have Apple Macs 
and they advocate their Apple i-books to their direct reports (which we 
can deal with, Apple users are generally religious about their Mac's) 
but now we've opened another office in a new continent and they have let 
them use Sony Vaios so now we have 3 hardware platforms to deal with. My 
team is having trouble just keeping up with support of the Dell Laptop's 
as well as the server, corpwan & engineering infrastructure as well as 
new projects & request,  note. almost all users have a laptops and they 
can be somewhat troublesome to deal with (the laptops, not th users, I 
mean ;-) ).

I've been accused of abusing using my power by the Exec's by trying to 
enforce the corporate policy of Dell and maybe their right, I attempted 
to enforce the policy in order to minimise the support burden and 
standardise on a supportable base for hardware support and software 
deployment.

What can I do to mitigate this situation? I feel split down the middle 
i.e. people should be able to work with what they're comfortable in 
order to get the best from them and I want our IT Service organisation 
to be business enablers but we're resource constrained and the fewer 
platforms we deal with the better service we can offer our users i.e. 
faster provision, better software & hardware support and repairs, etc.

Cheers

-Martin