What makes a world class it organization

Quite a few organizations get overly concerned with debates about centralization vs. This allows for a different dialogue altogether. Early in the history of IT, computers were too expensive for any one department. Therefore, the enterprise took on the burden. The cost of the equipment, people and operation ensured that few machines were in the company and by default it was common.

In the ss the explosion of inexpensive departmental and desktop computing made IT affordable and within reach of almost every business department.

We also want architectural leverage and re-use, which are about the Architectural Outcomes that are there to create future Business Agility. These are difficult but important choices. This avoids fighting the business physics of funding models and decision rights. While there are no perfect structures, IT should be organized in a way that gives the business transparency and clarity, in terms of simplified accountabilities and less bureaucracy, on who is fulfilling their technology solution needs.

Working on assignments and solutions only to find out another group is doing the same thing is very frustrating, not to mention wasteful. At the Feld Group Institute, we recognize that restructuring your organization can be quite the undertaking, and can often be overwhelming, especially to do it the right way.

In turn, this mitigates the risk of a system failure or any interruption to business activities. Nowadays, another increasingly important element of concern is infrastructure and information security. In addition to conventional physical security practices, a growing number of companies are proactively adopting cybersecurity measures, as well as revisiting existing security practices.

Given the wide range of potential threats to security — such as natural disaster, network attacks, viruses, fraud, espionage, data portability etc. However, it is worth noting that security awareness and compliance apply to every employee — not just the CISO and their team.

Approaches such as socializing best practices among employees, conducting company-wide security training or hosting security simulations can help mitigate the regulatory, financial and technical risk of a security incident.

Disaster recovery is the process by which business resumes after disaster which can be both man-made or natural has occurred, whereas business continuity is about how business resumes during other events besides disaster e. Furthermore, it may be helpful to determine the probability that certain hypothetical scenarios will occur and develop mitigation and recovery strategies based on that analysis.

Finally, IT leaders should focus on improving their service desk or help desk. It is vital for the help desk to build credibility among its user base i.

Project and portfolio management is becoming more and more essential for IT departments, as the need for greater transparency continues to increase. Previously, a lot of business executives did not always understand what went into procuring, creating and maintaining technology and as such, were often reliant on the cost and time estimates provided by their IT departments.

However, recent reporting regulations as well as rapid digitalization of business and commerce means that companies now need more clarity and insight into where investment in IT is going.

If executed well, several components of project and portfolio management can distinguish a World Class IT department from its peers — idea generation, prioritization, budgeting, portfolio management, project management and execution, quality assurance QA and post-project analysis. First, idea generation is a process that is often problematic for companies. Many companies only allow more senior staff members to generate and submit ideas for projects, or give staff a limited time window to submit their ideas.

These rules often lead to ideas not being sourced from the broader employee population and cause ideas that emerge outside of the submission window to be held off until following years. Given all of these issues, companies could establish a clear governance structure, comprising several review committees of appropriate business and IT stakeholders.

Within the governance structure, each committee should have clearly designated roles and various levels of the company should be involved, to ensure that perspectives and feedback are representative of the broader employee base. The submission and review process for ideas should also occur more regularly, rather than once a year.

Once determined, projects and portfolios should then be prioritized by the review committees. There are many ways to do this, but several criteria to be considered include: strategic fit, cost to benefit analysis, project interdependency, qualitative benefit versus change and risk analysis.

Furthermore, budgeting can occur more easily once projects have been prioritized. By allocating funding to projects from in order or priority, the IT department can set an expectation of projects that will be deferred to the next budgeting cycle. Budgets could also account for projects that may emerge later or throughout in the year, to encourage innovation within the department.

Good budgeting, in turn, helps the IT department better manage its portfolios. However, what defines good portfolio management? Several suggestions include: regular meeting cadences, establishing a program management office, effective project monitoring via dashboards and other tools and so on. When it comes to portfolio management, one key challenge that many companies face is the inability to cancel projects, as sunk costs are often used to justify continuing non-performing projects, rather than canceling them and redistributing resources to other initiatives.

Truly World Class IT departments are unafraid to delay or cancel non-performing projects and reallocate resources to initiatives that they know will create move value in the long term. Similar to portfolio management, IT leaders can rethink their approaches to project management and execution. It is interesting to note that truly World Class IT departments typically have a well-developed, well-documented project methodology or toolkit that is applicable to and can be tailored to all kinds of projects.

In particular, project managers should play a dynamic role in leading and coordinating the teams for the project, monitoring milestones, etc. IT leadership can significantly encourage active and diligent project management by identifying the appropriate talent, as well as recognizing project managers for their efforts.

As such, effective portfolio management, project management and execution can enable IT to maximize performance and deliver better results. Moreover, quality assurance QA is often overlooked by many companies, but is critical in ensuring that any technology released by IT is high-performing, high-quality and does not require constant fixes. Some high-level suggestions for bettering QA processes include clearly defining quality gates and involving QA early on in the development lifecycle, but this list is not exhaustive.

World Class IT departments have no qualms reviewing and revamping QA processes as needed and ensuring that they are consistent across portfolios and projects. Whatever your industry, we have technology partnerships in place to assist in planning, procurement, implementation and the continuous improvement of your IT solutions. Our hardware, software, and security solution partners are vetted extensively to meet our strict set of standards, as is our commitment to compliance for the following regulations:.

By contributing to the discussion about business strategy, IT is in a strong position to determine which aspects of IT are best handled by external partners. Further, IT must be adept at managing those relationships to be sure the company gains the expected value from its outsourcing activity. As a successful company, you use a variety of professional services and trust they will provide reliable, cost effective solutions. Our goal as your external, outsourced IT partner is to provide you with a fully resourced, full-time IT department to keep your network running and protect against data loss, so you can focus on what you do best — running your business.

Our services and solutions are architected to have a transformative impact to businesses through our unwavering commitment to always do the right thing for our clients, our people and our communities.

ThrottleNet provides world class IT management and security solutions tailored to the unique needs and business objectives of SMBs. Contact us to set up a free consultation and find out how we can help keep your network running smoothly and to protect it from external and internal threats so you can focus on growing your business. When IT triumphs, business triumphs. In short, our business is helping your business.