Are you a good manager of IT ?
IT Support
It’s not an easy question to answer, but recent research provides measures of UK IT management success that you can use as a comparison point. The research, which covered 130 IT Managers in UK businesses, was published by Kavanagh Consulting in Jan 2010. Their key findings were:
IT Service Level Agreements:
Best: 14% of companies had SLAs based on overall user experience
Average: 65% of companies had SLAs based on standard metrics (e.g. uptime)
Not so good: 9% only had verbal SLAs: the bottom 11% had no SLAs at all
Alignment of systems to business processes:
Best: 42% said that departments pay for IT based on actual or estimated usage
Average: 54% of IT decision-makers said that IT is funded and managed centrally: just another cost.
The authors likened most IT implementations to the City of London: a sprawling mass of the old and the new that has evolved over time, which is why it’s hard to manage and measure it cohesively.
Their recommendation is to implement an IT Road Map that aims to better integrate legacy systems and make them more manageable, and responsive to changing needs. The stages to get there start with reducing complexity and increasing standardisation to increase reliability and reduce management costs. Then IT management can focus their energy and spend on new, innovative uses of IT, rather than just ‘keeping the lights on’. For more details on the research, visit www.kavanagh.co.uk.
Fotec have wide experience implementing IT Road Maps to manage IT effectively and deliver real business benefit. For more details, just call 0845 601 6480 or just click here.