If you have any doubts, this maker of real things (Oreos, Oscar Meyer hot dogs, Trident and Tang) is trying to turn this digital state of working into a commodity with its own internal brand name and slogan — as you’ll read about in my story next week on SearchCIO.com. Roberta Cadieux, director for information systems service delivery at Kraft, recounts the IT department’s efforts to harness the mobile gadgets and ubiquitous networks that employees increasingly take for granted into a coherent IT-business strategy — and the difficulty of selling the strategy (as opposed to the gadgets) to employees.

The transformation of how work gets done at Kraft extends to its physical offices, where “open innovative spaces” are replacing traditional cubicles and offices. The rank and file no longer are assigned desks. Employees can work from wherever when they are in the office. Wall-huggers — people who have worked at Kraft for years and feel they’ve earned the right to a corner office — have been given glassed-in rooms — fishbowls — but the occupants are increasingly “being challenged why they need them,” Cadieux said. Persuading people to change how they work has been hard, she added — so much so that she said she would like to go into the change management field.

One of the aspects of Cadieux’s job that does not get much play in my upcoming piece is her involvement with Kraft’s facilities people. She told me she worked hand-in-glove with Steelcase, the office furniture giant, to design the space, even walking into the office on Fridays to see how many people were there (usually almost half empty). As Cadieux was telling me about working with office designers, it occurred to me that one interesting spin-off is that IT will play a bigger role in the design of not only the IT architecture but also the physical space that employees inhabit.

Desktop virtualization is still uncharted territory for many organizations and CIOs, such as Maytee Aspuro, CIO at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. That’s why she and Fennell both had backup plans in case their application and desktop virtualization projects blew up in their cutting-edge faces.

Aspuro and her team are virtualizing 1,200 desktops using VMware desktop virtualization and Unidesk virtual desktop management technologies. The pilot phase in 2010 called for hiring a new staff that could virtualize 350 desktops within eight months. The time frame unnerved her because she had walked into a freshly minted organization: The department was new, created by the merger of three government agencies, and it had 30 vacant IT staff positions.

So, while Aspuro’s team began building a platform for a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), she bought Lenovo laptops fully loaded with applications for employees in the field. Fortunately for her, the pilot phase went well, and the remaining 850 devices, old and new, will be repurposed as virtual desktops, including the Lenovo laptops.

“With such a tight timeline, and because we hadn’t done VDI before, we needed a fallback plan that we could put in place in only a few weeks,” Aspuro said.

Fennell calls his contingency plan a hybrid mode in which users could access their data and applications on his college’s Web portal, using VDI, application virtualization and provisioning technologies by Citrix Systems. The applications also were installed locally on college-owned devices so users could use the Web portal and compare it to their app performance on their college desktops.

This hybrid approach also “gave users a level of comfort that, if [the Web portal] crashed, they had their application locally installed as well,” Fennell said.

After a year, as students became comfortable with the Web portal’s performance, Fennell’s team began removing the locally installed applications, and all new apps became Web-portal-accessible only.

It wasn’t exactly a contingency plan, but more of a reassurance to users getting used to a new services delivery model. Still, phasing in desktop virtualization is highly recommended, whether it’s done to comfort end users or to make sure that the technology actually does what it’s supposed to do in a complex computing environment that has a lot of room for error.

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director

This year, anecdotally, VMware said at its partner show that the majority of its customers are evaluating, testing or rolling out its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product.

Last month, Citrix Systems said that 1,000 new customers bought its desktop virtualization technology in Q4 2009, with several customers buying more than 10,000 seats.

In addition, a very large food manufacturer plans to virtualize 10,000 desktops this year, according to a system integrator I spoke with who had interviewed a job applicant working on the project.

There aren’t many CIOs putting themselves out there as desktop virtualization pioneers on a large scale, however. There are risks involved, after all: The technology is not mature, the ROI is questionable, new strategies have to be developed to account for the capacity needs of a virtual infrastructure, and software companies are still trying to figure out how to support their applications in a virtual environment.

Yet companies are moving forward with desktop virtualization. Independent Bank Corp., out of Iona, Mich., for example, has 1,000 virtual desktops as part of its disaster recovery strategy.

Disaster recovery was not named as a top driver for desktop virtualization in an informal survey conducted by Forrester Research analyst Mark Bowker. What did top the list? Reduced capital expenses associated with traditional desktops, simplified application upgrades and deployments, and reduced operational expenses tied to supporting client devices.

Let us know what is moving desktop virtualization forward — or holding it back — at your company. Email ctorode@techtarget.com.