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December 7, 1998

Methods For Management

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Business units must provide IT with a central point of contact to ensure active customer participation and support. A knowledgeable business manager who officially represents the business unit often fills this role. This role also involves gaining support from the business unit at a grass-roots level.

IT must learn to sell its services using a business-oriented language its customers can easily understand, and avoid overly complex technology terminology and buzzwords. Customers must understand how the technology provided by IT will help their business units achieve their goals. The business value of IT must be clearly spelled out to business executives and middle management.

Remember The Basics
It's paramount to realize that to succeed in promoting its technology services, IT must make sure it is in a position to keep its commitments. Therefore, IT must be able to deliver a certain level of quality in its services. If IT falls short of delivering a basic quality of services, then it has no solid foundation to prove its value and sell its successes to targeted customers.

The best service-oriented IT organizations in the world recognize that their strongest asset--besides technology, organization and disciplined processes--is their people. A company's competitors likely have access to the same technology and systems-management tools. So it's important to realize that one of the major factors that will help to differentiate your organization as a world-class provider of IT services will be how well you leverage your people.

World-class IT organizations have formally documented their streamlined systems-management processes and trained their people to perform them. Likewise, they have developed core competencies for the technologies they support. As the IT service organization demonstrates a strong commitment to provide quality training for its employees, each staffer must show the willingness to develop new skills that might span heterogeneous technologies. Training must be treated as formal subprojects and closely monitored for efficiency and effectiveness. The progress made by each staff should be closely supervised to ensure that the new skills are applied in an effective manner on the job.

Furthermore, it is important to control and optimize the training budget to get the most out of the expenditure. The most critical technology skill shortages should be identified and prioritized by order of importance. The IT training strategy and plan must be closely tied with your most critical and urgent technology requirements.

In an environment in which IT managers are required to do more with less, automating systems-management processes is a good idea once they have been streamlined and roles and responsibilities have been clearly spelled out.

Automated tools are only as good as the organizational structures and skilled people used to manage them. The market offers many best-of-breed systems-management products or frameworks. Select tools that support flexible and open architectures, based on your company's requirements for systems-management disciplines.

These tools must be able to support your IT's evolving organizational structures, processes, and heterogeneous technology platforms. As a rule of thumb, the return on investment for the acquisition of enterprise systems-management tools should materialize within 12 to 16 months or less. If you cannot achieve this goal, then you should revise your automation investment strategy.

Don't throw away your existing systems-management tools--especially if you have made considerable investments in them--in favor of a more complex framework. Instead, try to leverage your existing tools to render more benefits.

Systems-management tools and frameworks will provide optimal business value to the distributed enterprise only if they are integrated within a sound organizational framework of skilled people and streamlined operational systems-management processes. Only then will IT departments succeed in providing its customers with an infrastructure that consistently offers high levels of serviceability, performance, availability, reliability, and supportability that businesses today require.

Roger Fournier is an IT manager with an multinational aerospace manufacturer. He is the author of A Methodology for Client/Server and Web Application Development (Prentice-Hall PTR, September 1998). He can be reached at rogerf@aei.ca.

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