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December 7, 1998

Methods For Management

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The organizational structure must be engineered for effectiveness by fully comprehending how systems-management processes transcend the enterprise's traditional divisional boundaries. The overall effectiveness of a systems-management process is directly proportional to the sum of the individual effectiveness of each of its constituents.

Consequently, all the groups with a stake in a complete systems-management process should be held accountable for their specific portion of the process. For example, different functional groups across the enterprise must combine their efforts to successfully support, as a unified team and from beginning to end, the capacity-planning workflow process. In order to ensure that all these cross-functional groups will work together toward achieving the same goal and operate with greater synergy, it's essential to obtain the buy-in of high-level executives.

The IT organizational structure can be set up to support the enterprise systems-management processes and can be implemented with a combination of centralized control and distributed operations.

It's not unusual for large enterprises to co-locate IT staff with their customers, at different geographical sites. At the same time, these organizations also have a centralized IT development staff at their headquarters.

The centralized IT staff is responsible for the development of business systems that will be used across business units. The decentralized IT staff is responsible for satisfying specific business units' needs for local systems.

The decentralized staff often reports directly to a business unit's local management. This reporting structure is aimed at achieving better customer satisfaction. However, it's important to ensure that the entire IT staff follows the same technology policies and practices. If the IT organization wants to contain its costs while still providing quality services to customers, it must organize itself around a standardized technology environment. IT must implement and enforce standards that govern technology selection and usage across the enterprise.

Infrastructure Management
The Technology Infrastructure Services organization--or data center--is responsible for managing the infrastructure services and the key business applications. Technology Infrastructure Services is often made up of different organizational subunits that share different responsibilities, such as computer operations services, technical support, and network services.

Computer operations is usually responsible for implementing critical systems-management processes, such as change management, problem management, configuration management, and help-desk management.

The modern IT organization must be role-based. Consequently, IT should develop a comprehensive role and responsibility model that reflects the processes, organizational structures, and distributed technologies put in place to serve customers. It's a lot easier to manage an organization in which each group has a clear understanding of its new roles and responsibilities, especially in a complex environment.

Avoid grouping the IT organization into a stovepipe model in which each platform is managed by an independent vertical organization. A stovepipe organization creates silos that lead to communication barriers that are hard to eradicate later on.

Effective communication is paramount. Create a position for someone who will manage customer relationships. Among other things, this person or group is responsible for formulating and implementing a formal communication strategy. It should also advertise IT successes to the business units and convey the impact that IT initiatives might have on the business.

Finally, the IT organization must regularly communicate how it intends to support core business processes, report the progress it makes in achieving this goal, and seek active support to overcome potential roadblocks. This continuous communication process requires strong coordination and cooperation between all IT groups. It also requires strong participation from the business units supported by the IT department.