This is a short introduction to series of articles and materials which will help you to raise your IT organization to the next level. You’ll get as much “meet on the bone” as possible. Enjoy!
First thing is to analyse the IT organization, identify elements of it (goals, structure, assets, services, processes, people etc.) and create a tangible foundation, a baseline, to be able to make educated decisions.
There is nothing more dangerous for the organization and devastating for employees than uneducated decisions, taken on a hint (do not mistake it for intuition built on experience) which are not making sense. Due to the size, conducting a comprehensive analysis can be a complex exercise as usually there is no single person who can comprehend the whole organization with all its activities, goals, and assets, but it is definitely worth the effort.
You might have encountered a quote assigned to one of greatest US presidents:
“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first six hours sharpening my axe.”
Abraham Lincoln
This beautifully underlines the importance of preparation, but when you’d discuss with a professional lumberjack, he’d also add few more notes and made other preparations:
- Checking out the size and diameter, identify obstacles and risks.
- Adjusting the team – some things can be done alone while other only in a group.
- Choosing the right tools e.g. chainsaw instead of axe.
- Planning the direction of the fall and how to ensure it (slice, ropes).
The same applies to optimizing the IT organization. Following apm.zone’s values (Quality, Practicality, Reality) we will be looking into respective aspects:
- What is the value of the approach?
- How to utilize the outcome?
- Which organizations will benefit the most?
- What is the product?
- How to do this?
- What data, resources and tools are needed?
- What are the challenges and mitigations?
- What is the difficulty level?
- What are the tools, solutions or third parties that can help?
- What are the key takeaways?
The best effects bring things that we can describe and capture as facts; however, I’m also going to go through more “fluffy” elements like Strategy as such areas are an essential element of the IT organization and have strong influence on how it performs and where it’s heading.
Different areas will have various flavours on how to analyse them, what information and depth of insight we can get, and what will be the final influence on the organization.
Here are key domains we’ll be investigating:
- Real IT Spend [Read Article] [Watch Video]
- Business and IT Capabilities [coming soon]
- Processes [coming soon]
- IT Services [coming soon]
- IT Assets (Software, Hardware, Mobile, Cloud, Network) [coming soon]
- People (Competencies, Organization) [coming soon]
- Systems / Applications [coming soon]
- Structure (Internal vs. External, On-premises vs Cloud) [coming soon]
- Integrations [coming soon]
- Data [coming soon]
Of course, maturity of companies varies, so it may be a case where all IT Assets are in control; however, Processes or IT Services parts do not exist. My aim is to give you actionable insight no matter what level of maturity your organization has or challenges it faces.
We will go through everything step by step and look for the most efficient approach in the context of the whole company. This way you will be able to use everything holistically or only elements which are currently needed.
Let us get to it!
