Considerations for successful enterprise information systems deployment—The case of the Greek School Network

Managing the IT environment of large organizations such as the Greek School Network is challenging not only due to the complexity, diversity and age of the information processing infrastructure but also due to geographic dispersion and the IT support model. Recently, the Network attempted to follow known practices for IT enterprise management; in order to organize and automate both supervision and intervention it employed centralized system management architectures. This paper records the challenges encountered in order to configure a deployable, high-end enterprise platform for the management of school labs across the Greek School Network. The paper reaches the conclusion that such systems or services are not always straightforward to deploy or scale and discusses alternative directions that can bring general purpose infrastructure management for organisations that cannot benefit from enterprise systems yet are still in need of analogous functionality.