More on MSPs and the new IT department

There seems to be more and more discussion in the IT world about Managed Services Providers and the duality of the IT department – strategy vs. tactical.

This item from Jason Hiner at TechRepublic speculates on the future of the IT department.
“Sanity check: Is IT moving toward an inevitable split between in-house strategy and outsourced operations?”

Some very serious – not just vendors – names are mentioned in the article as clearly identifying the two distinct roles and activities of an IT department.

I’m curious to know – does your organization think this way?

Dean Owen

Wikinomics – have you been wikified yet?

Check out this book – ‘Wikinomics – how mass collaboration changes everything‘ by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams. They also have a website http://www.wikinomics.com/ with lots of interesting bits. An easy to read book putting forth the idea that the next (and in some cases current) business model is the adoption of the social network and open source concept for business. I really enjoyed it and it certainly made a lot of sense to me.

Two quick observations…

• They cite the same companies over and over again as examples that support their points. Although these companies are multinationals and worth billions…I would have liked to have more examples.
• Is this a totally new management and business model, which will eventually reign supreme over all others? Or will it be successful in only some cases and just be an alternative?

My favourite chapter was Chapter 9 – The Wiki Workplace and their profile of the Geek Squad.  

I come from a command and control management environment. That was what I was taught – through formal education and on the job observation. Although I always felt that I was more of a benevolent despot when compared to some other managers. After reading the book and looking back at some of the things I did as a manager/supervisor, I can actually see that I was attempting to implement some wikified type strategies – though certainly not to the degree talked about in Wikinomics.

Experts profile the New IT Organization

From IT World Canada . . .Future Stock – Experts profile the new IT organization By: Carolyn Duffy Marsan

While they offer some suggestions, it appears to be in reworking what is already there. Sometimes you need to bulldoze the house into the foundations to rebuild something of value. Lipstick and mascara isn’t always enough!

More on the demise of the IT Department

This article from IT World Canada – IT shops face fuzzy future by Rosie Lombardi is another take on the Gartner statement regarding the demise of the IT function as we know it. She digs a little deeper and makes reference to the book “Does IT Matter?” by Nicholas Carr, published in 2003. You can get some more of his perspective from his blogs of the subject. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’m certainly curious to know what he has to say on this.

A new IT department model?

Or at least an alternative?

Based on some of the articles, blogs and comments I’ve read lately about the crisis in IT management and how it needs to change, I’m proposing the following model for an IT department.

Follow-up to the last two posts

I spent most of the morning reading through blogs I subscribe to and posted some items of interest here. When I got back to my blog, it occured to me that the last two might come across as negative…quite the contrary.

HP: IT as we know it is over

A post from a Techrepublic forum:   Have we reached the end of the IT era? led me to this one from Dan Farber at ZDNet’s BTL  HP: IT as we know it is over.

Both of them are worth a read. Some of the signs mentioned in both blogs, I’ve seen in my last place of work.

 

Gartner: Wake up IT managers, you’re mediocre (at best)

Found this in the BTL blog at ZDnet … Gartner: Wake up IT managers, you’re mediocre (at best)

This is very real for most, if not all legacy IT departments. The challenge for an IT manager is simple: keep the old stuff working, bring in new stuff and Oh, by the way – do it all with no increase in budget, and possibly a reduction in budget!

It’s certainly not easy – hence the amount of failure in IT service delivery –  (not to mention heads on the chopping block!)