I was following a LinkedIn discution about what areas of IT managment gives most problems and there was a very interesting oppinion about where all the listes problems really came from.
Robert Hossary said that
"departments have mostly lost the ability to understand business processes. They do not research the tools required to best suit a process or solve a problem. To many of these departments and their personnel the Operating System or specific program becomes a religion and therefore they cannot see beyond the brand.
[...]
If IT did their research and embraced the correct tools for the job rather than the best gadget for cool status then maybe they could solve issues like; resource allocation; project management; ability to sell change to management and train users; working with other departments; working with a small budget and so on."
I must say I tend to agree with this point of view.
I've already wrote about how a bad IT choice ruined and organization productivity. It was one of the worst cases I've remember, and suffered with.
The IT decided to go into full virtualization, this means every one used virtual machines.
Productivity fall, specially in the development teams and even the business managers saw that was ruining their timings and, in some cases, their budgets.
When confronted with that productivity problem, the IT manager said it was the best choice, and it was it. The best choice? For whom?
Not for the organization, that's for sure.
But virtualization was cool back then, so they've just had to have it.
On another occasion, I remember I was trying to persuade my manager to get us a requirement tool for the analysis phase. It was expensive so it was not easy to get approval. But one day we got lucky! We had the chance to get exactly the requirement tool we needed, almost for free! One of the holding companies, to which we were very close, decided not to use the requirement tool anymore, since they moved to something else. So, there was a good chance we could get it cheap, with a one year support service included and all. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, not for my manager, that stated "if that's not good enough for them, then it's not good enough for us"!
Actually it was excellent for us, but with that "childish" behavior we ended up with no tool at all!
Everyone makes bad decisions. Sometimes those bad decisions come from a bad "home work" and sometimes it just proved not to work as expected, despite all the investigation and tests performed.
When things don't work, what matters is to act upon it in order to fix it and to learn from that. What went wrong and why? Answering those questions and avoiding similar mistakes will result on a much better IT management. This is actually true for any area, not just for IT.
If IT management actually did its job well, then it would be doing a good job for the business. It would have a lot more time to focus on important issues instead of "fighting" in the political arena to defend bad choices. I believe this is also true for any area, not just for IT.
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