IT Management

Getting Great ICT Service Delivery

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I am prompted to write a post around ICT Service Delivery as I have a request-for-proposal from a prospective client to review their ICT Service area.  Without giving too much away, they seem to have a reasonable number of people in their IT area (about one staff member for every 20-25 PCs) which by every benchmark I’ve ever read is probably twice the normal benchmark.

And yet, the users aren’t happy.  In fact, they’re quite unhappy, it would seem – almost to the point where boiling oil, pitchforks, and tedious jokes about broken coffee-cup holders are considered necessary.

It just highlights to me, I think, that the area of ICT Service Delivery is one that businesses still haven’t got right – particularly SMEs, I think.  I consider that this is due to a distinct lack of engagement between the business and the IT service area.  It’s a governance problem – business doesn’t tell IT what it needs, and so IT guesses and fills in the blanks.  And good on IT for trying, but it doesn’t help much, even if they’re really good at guessing.  Really, the need is for the business to give direction to IT and identify what the needs are.  The current situation that all too often arises is that IT gives the correct answer to the wrong question.  One client had four network administrators and one person on the help desk.

Not surprisingly, at a technical level the network worked very well (packets were not lost, data was transported around) but users were exceptionally unhappy (no application maintenance people, apparently, results in applications that don’t get maintained).

Anyway, the answer to great ICT service delivery seems to be:

  1. Know why you are doing something
  2. Know what it is you are trying to achieve
  3. Know who is responsible for achieving which aspects of the service
  4. Be informed as to how performance is going.
  5. If you are tempted to go beyond points 1-4, have a Bex and good lie down.

This means that you have to get the planning component right (links with the business – do what is needed), and then have the best practice components together for your building and managing components of the IT function (some version of ITIL/COBIT/PRINCE2/PMBOK) and THEN focus on the ‘running’ of IT.  In my experience problems in ICT service delivery really relate back to problems in the governance of IT – but it’s usually easier and more satisfying to yell at IT than to fix the real problems of the business.

Release of Internet Explorer 7

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Earlier this week saw the release of Internet Explorer 7.  This is the much-awaited browser, with tabbed browsing, improved security, and acknowledgement of RSS feeds.  However there are already reports that IE7 has a security vulnerability, which won’t make Redmond too happy (although they dispute it). 

As it is of course, anything as large and complex as Internet Explorer has become is going to have difficulties of course, and that’s why the first advice for most businesses is to try before you buy, and wait for the first patch release.  The problem with that of course is that IE 7 promises a fair bit to resolve user issues – security, tabbed browsing, and RSS feeds to simply information management – and of course it’s free, so it’s a very tempting upgrade.  Who knows, perhaps it will save western civilisation, as I think the latest claims are amounting to…

By the way, I know that I am starting to sound like an old salt wistfully thinking of the good old days, but remember when a browser was, well, a browser?

How you spend your IT dollar

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Sometimes that old plant and equipment should go where it's appreciated - the museumI have been mining the archives for relevant publications to post to the website. The firm in 2001/2002 published a monthly IT issues newsletter (pretty much before we’d heard of blogs). I am intending to publish some select articles that are still relevant to the blog.
The first of these is ‘How you spend your IT dollar‘. By way of note, I believe I eventually gave the bike away to Lifeline, so hopefully there is a teenager out there who is using it to good effect these days. Unless it was still a deathtrap, in which case I hope the teenager’s still quite sullen.

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Fighting IT Failure should be Toasting IT’s Success!

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CIO.com has an article, the topic of which is close to my heart – the success of IT projects.  I have a theory that says that more IT projects would be successful if the IT guys could find it in their hearts to say ‘no’ more often, and ‘that’s got to follow our defined methodology before we do it’. 

Apparently AG Edwards in this article reduced their failure rate (behind schedule, over budget) for projects from 50% to 12%.  The focus was on IT’s understanding the business, on having business understand both the business needs and the potential of technology, and on prioritising and finishing projects. 

The article is really worth a read.

Budgets in Australia, IT, and You

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The new Smartcard seems to have given the government’s budget expenditure on information technology a bit of a boost.  Hopefully they realise that replacing 17 cards with 1 is a whole lot more difficult than it sounds when you say it really fast. 

ZDNet has an overview on the implications of 2006’s budget on the technology industry, as does Australian IT.  Department of Communication, Information Technology, and the Arts has its wrap-up here (predictably positive):  Budget at a Glance.  A quick glance at party-politic websites finds no specific responses to issues around technology, as yet, as contained in the budget. 

The big deal seems very much to be on the adjusted depreciation schedules on business – the diminishing value for assets including computers has gone from 150 percent to 200 percent.  This ‘merely’ reflects the real decline in asset value, particularly for technology – which alone should be pretty good for business.