Does your IT department have a strategy?

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airfern

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Topic # 150862 5-Aug-2014 20:21

airfern

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Reply # 1102902 5-Aug-2014 21:09

Nobody in IT dept. knows a clue of this question, but some IT Outsource company does, so management is ready to 100% outsource, ignoring the huge part of the invisible infrastructure.

MikeB4

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Reply # 1102904 5-Aug-2014 21:11

One person supports this post

You are very light on details

Mike
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freitasm

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Reply # 1102913 5-Aug-2014 21:21

I think the OP could expand a bit more on the question and why he's asking it. Very cryptic.

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airfern

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Reply # 1102983 5-Aug-2014 23:27

We have a great strategy. We monitor everything and when it goes down, we bring it back up. Works everytime.

Well, be prepared to be outsourced soon, cause it's not a good enough IT strategy :)
Sorry guys, can't open more details at this stage, but geekiegeek's comment is probably the closest one here.
Just wanted to know if anyone ever seen the "Loch Ness IT Strategy" in other companies :)

CamH

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Reply # 1102987 5-Aug-2014 23:33

airfern:

We have a great strategy. We monitor everything and when it goes down, we bring it back up. Works everytime.

Well, be prepared to be outsourced soon, cause it's not a good enough IT strategy :)
Sorry guys, can't open more details at this stage, but geekiegeek's comment is probably the closest one here.
Just wanted to know if anyone ever seen the "Loch Ness IT Strategy" in other companies :)

Haha sorry mate, we are an "outsourced" IT company. I was being sarcastic to compliment your lack of detail in your posts. I would be very interested in hearing this strategy of yours however?

freitasm

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Reply # 1103033 6-Aug-2014 08:15

I think the OP put a valid question and only see childish replies. I am going to remove all of them and expect people to participate like adults in the IT Pro subforum.

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wasabi2k

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Reply # 1103035 6-Aug-2014 08:22

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As a serious response:

At a Strategic Level:
I am not involved at a management level - but it has been stated that we are here to response to business needs and direction. That is, we support planned business initiatives by designing, implementing and maintaining the technology and information systems to support them. In addition we work to provide the information to assist in the assessment of these initiatives at an early stage.

Which sounds great, but being reactionary is immensely challenging - particularly when initiatives have tight deadlines.

At a more tactical level:
We have done a lot of work recently on managing lifecycle - hardware (server and desktop), software (office, windows, sql) and networking. We need to manage and plan for the replacement/upgrade of all the above as they come out of support/we need new stuff. This is stuff like standard server models - planned lifetime for hardware etc. Capacity planning also comes into this - growth rate of storage/VM environment etc.

At a design level - we built everything that can be to be site redundant across data centres - with the ability to run in the event of a site failure. Our core design principles are high availability and virtual first.

At an operational level:
We manage and monitor our service desk and issue/problem/change management - a key driver has been getting better visibility of these processes and the numbers are assessed weekly for trending and for identifying areas of improvement (such as user self service).

From a server side - monitoring and visibility has been another key driver. Knowing about an issue before a user calls is the goal - preemptive identification and resolution of problems is the goal.

So yes - we have a strategy, multiple ones in fact. The focus depends entirely on if you are talking to the CIO, Infrastructure/Service Desk Manager of the Team Leader.

MikeB4

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Reply # 1103044 6-Aug-2014 08:41

Outsourcing is a legitimate and often very successful strategy, it does not work in every scenario but it definitely has it's place. In my career I have taken an IT unit from the brink of being outsourced to being very successful, I have also recommended and change managed an IT unit to being outsourced
so I have seen both ends of the spectrum.

Mike
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The views stated in my posts are my personal views and not that of any other organisation.

It's our only home, lets clean it up then...

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Inphinity

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Reply # 1103062 6-Aug-2014 09:16

Yes, we do.

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BlueShift

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Reply # 1103093 6-Aug-2014 09:33

We do, and we just spent 2 days on a team retreat discussing aspects of it.

frankv

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Reply # 1103227 6-Aug-2014 12:39

BlueShift: We do, and we just spent 2 days on a team retreat discussing aspects of it.

BTDT.

My experience has been that IT strategies aren't worth the paper they're written on. If the business is short of money, spending *will* be deferred. Only when something breaks does it get the attention of the bean-counters.

BlueShift

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Reply # 1103274 6-Aug-2014 13:29

frankv:
BlueShift: We do, and we just spent 2 days on a team retreat discussing aspects of it.

BTDT.

My experience has been that IT strategies aren't worth the paper they're written on. If the business is short of money, spending *will* be deferred. Only when something breaks does it get the attention of the bean-counters.

We're lucky in that we do have a good budget, and buy-in from the company to have the decent infrastructure needed for the science they do. Belt-tightening is always an issue though, but that's just a commercial reality - if the money ain't there, it can't be spent.

lchiu7

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Reply # 1103436 6-Aug-2014 16:07

I am not sure what the OP was asking but in terms of strategy I have developed a number of IT Strategies (Information Systems Strategic Plans) for a number of organisations.

They all start with the business plan and how IT can support the business direction and these days, how IT can create business or efficiency opportunities. This is a an ongoing dialogue with the business and a continuing discussion with an IT Governance group if one exists.

Any strategy that focusses on servers, OS updates etc. is not worth the paper it's written on. They are written by folks who think IT exists to its own end. Without the business, IT has no role.

That sort of work is the nuts and bolts of IT. Business usually don't care how that works so long as it does. But I have seen many CIO's who focus on that and lose focus on the business, and eventually lose their jobs! Or failing that you get shadow IT in organisation as business units, frustrated by the lack of IT support for their work, go and do their own thing and then expect IT to make it work in the enterprise.

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