When Centralized IT Fails
My wife is an audiologist who uses specialized software to program hearing aids. When it breaks if she has administrative access, she can usually call the company and get it fixed, but when she’s working at a place where she doesn’t have administrative access, IT needs to get involved, and if they’re located off-site that can result in a painful and unproductive day. When she told me this story, it got me thinking about how many IT shops operate this way. You probably have a number of locations, possibly around the world, and IT tends to be in one place, probably the...
read moreSurvey Finds Reducing Complexity Critical for IT
A recent survey by the Hackett Group (requires registration to access PDF) found that reducing complexity in IT was one of the most important goals for IT pros. The results were published in a report called The CIO Agenda: IT’s Top Issues in 2012. The survey was conducted in late 2011 by Hackett Group and they questioned a number of different professionals in Global 1000 companies including finance, HR, IT, procurement and supply chain. When asked which priorities were highest for the company, respondents chose reducing complexity as the number 2 goal. Only aligning business and IT...
read moreIT Pros Need to be Watchful for Big Trends
We’ve all heard the term “Too Big to Fail” thrown about in recent years, referring to companies that are so large their failure could have an impact across the entire economy. We saw this first-hand in 2008 when AIG almost went belly up taking the world economy with it, but can IT departments be too big to change? I’ve been wondering that lately when I read about big companies caught in the cycle of change. We see it all around us, entire industries disoriented by the change all around them. It’s happening in big media of course where instead of embracing the...
read moreIT Needs a Seat at Business Strategy Table
IT has a clear role inside your organization. Of course, you keep the servers running. You monitor the applications, the hardware and the web sites. You make sure everything is running smoothly and you get on it straight away when something goes wrong, but you need to be doing more than that. You need to connect technology to the company’s overall goals — beyond just keeping it all working. In fact, in an article on Internet Evolution this week, Kim Davis wrote about 2012 analytics predictions providing a nice round-up from around the web, but Davis also had this to say...
read morePutting a Human Face on IT in 2012
There is a fantastic blog on InforWorld called Anonymous: Off the Record. It offers a venue for IT Ops pros to go and tell real stories of life in the IT trenches anonymously. It’s often not pretty, but what it does is put a human face on IT — and that’s really something you should strive to do more of in the coming year. The Off the Record stories drive home what you have to deal with from your perspective — like a guy who found out his program wasn’t actually broken. Instead layoffs had left too few humans to deal with the actual problem his program was...
read moreFree Real User Monitoring
This blog is sponsored by Correlsense,
the maker of SharePath RUM Express -
a free tool that provides a real-time
view into the actual experience of
your end-user, including availability,
response times and service levels.
