Bladewatch.com

So we left our app guy, wanting to own his domain, what’s the CIO thinking about all this?

Arnold, what’s going on in your space?

• Organizational change
• Discussions about green IT
• Doing more with less
• Virtualization – why we need it, why some people can’t use it
• Legacy kit and why we need to upgrade it
• Helpdesk statistics – who’s doing well and who isn’t
• Corporate IT strategy, where we are, where we need to be
• Data center space
• Aligning IT with the business need
• Budgets due to trading conditions
• Comparisons with other organizations “But my friend at ****** doesn’t have these problems”

What are your challenges?

• Everything’s become production – I can’t take a development system down during the day, we’re now effectively a 24/7 operation but my budget, my ‘business’ if you like isn’t set up like that.  Our organization is still set up very much around the 9-5 with on call support – but that’s not what the business are demanding – they want a guy available for changes and support 24/7 almost on demand
• Budgets, budgets, budgets, who owns what, who’s paying for what, why we’re paying for that, why we use that product and not that one, why we’re so expensive, that I can get a desktop from pc world for £300 but IT charge me £900 a year – but we include the software, licenses, the security patching, the audit trail, the billing, the end user helpdesk, phone system, desk and chair, as well as departmental storage, unlimited helpdesk support all day every day.
• Ownership – everyone seems to want to own their IT, but when I say, ok there’s your DataSynapse grid, you own and support it – you patch it, service pack it and manage the OS, often we get “but that’s an IT thing”
• Data center space – everyone wants data center space and power, how we manage expectations
• Escalations – getting called about a system going down, managing the various teams and the issue until it’s resolved – the need for more effective fault handling and resolution – I want to reduce the number of times I get escalated too – we need to establish what is tier1 and what tier 2/3 applications are being escalated sometimes unnecessarily.
• Complexity of the infrastructure, as we compartmentalize roles and ownership, the reporting, the billing, the delivery and organizational structure has to change to meet this, requiring more people management and communication.  You’re still a server guy, just you now report to Mike.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.