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Junior Interface Specialists
Junior Business
•
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ier 3 system support
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Exhibit 17.3
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439
440
The Back Office: Efficient Firm Operations
When organizing a department we follow some general rules of thumb
that we will share with you:
• Separate application and operations.
• When possible, hire good managers to oversee each group.
• Do not allow individuals to f loat around the organization in odd roles that don’t report up through the two main lines (i.e., no f loating boxes).
When the organization chart must start ref lecting personnel with f loating boxes, chances are there is something dysfunctional occurring.
• Develop growth ratios for each position so that senior leadership can determine the proper headcount to assign to the group over time.
• Develop consistent titles and roles/responsibilities. Each person/
position should have a concise and clear one-page role description with quarterly or annual management objectives.
Another approach is to create a chart that indicates how the IT organization is structured to address user needs. While this type of chart is not as intuitive to read, a very brief textual description can accompany it and will provide users a better understanding of how the organizational structure is designed to support them. Describing the organization in this way can also help ensure efficient operations. A functional view of the organization will show where redundancies exist.
For multioffice professional services firms, IT department organization can become somewhat challenging. Should each office have a dedicated IT
support person? Can local IT support purchase hardware or must that be accomplished at the headquarters? If the local office needs call for the addition of a server, must that server match the corporate standard? In general, most firms will want centralized management and control of IT support and purchasing decisions to ensure economies of scale and standardization of the environment to minimize support cost. Additionally, any office with more than 30 employees will typically need a dedicated IT support person. Offices under this size can manage via a local part-time or contract support resource. Most duties today can also be managed remotely by the corporate support team. Exhibit 17.4 shows how the staffing of the IT organization might change over time with the growth of the firm.
Another issue for multioffice firms is the collaboration between geographically dispersed IT employees. Many times the relationship between IT professionals in two markets may be acrimonious because of communication issues.
Many firms have been successful at minimizing this behavior by organizing field personnel into virtual teams. For example, the virtual team responsible for IT process documentation may actually be composed of members from many different cities. This allows geographically separated employees to work together on IT projects and allows them to build a relationship while working
Information Technology
441
COMPANY SIZE (NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES)
RESOURCE
0–25
25–50
50–100
100–200
00–400
CIO/IT director
—
0.25
0.50
0.75
1.00
Network/systems engineer
—
0.50
0.75
1.00
1.50
Network/systems administrator
0.25
0.50
0.75
1.00
2.00
Help desk supervisor
—
—
0.50
1.00
1.00
Jr. network/systems administrator
0.50
1.00
1.50
2.00
3.00
Help desk/desktop support
1.00
2.00
3.00
4.00
5.00
Exhibit 17.4
Typical IT Operations Resources Required for
Small- and Mid-Sized IT Departments (single location)
on a common cause. To fully build these teams, however, it is important for them to meet regularly. Consider having these teams meet at least once a month by conference call. Team members should be assigned action items and expected to move those action items to resolution and report on them regularly. Key members of the team should meet at least annually, in person, to discuss the more critical issues, plan for future development of the team, and build stronger interpersonal relationships. The relatively minor cost of these in-person gatherings is well offset by the benefits gained in system stability and overall technology expenditure.
One challenge with professional services companies is that sometimes offices are small. Even a small office, however, may need on-site support staff. This situation can cause the number of support staff compared to billable professional to increase, which, in turn, increases costs. This situation, however, can be mitigated with proper planning. First, the firm could simply decide that proper service to professional staff requires the extra cost. Even if a firm decides that in the first instance, it’s likely that the firm will put extreme cost of pressures in other areas of technology. Therefore, technology leadership must find a way to get the most benefit out of the local asset.
One way to accomplish this is to recognize that a local office IT person will be doing things other than support. Certain support aspects must be provided locally. It is not possible for a remote call center to change a hard drive or a monitor. Rather, it takes hands on, feet on the street in the local office. The local office IT person, however, may not spend 100 percent of his or her time conducting the support. Rather, he or she may also spend some time monitoring the servers, planning and executing upgrades, testing software, and performing various other projects. Significant cost savings can be
442
The Back Office: Efficient Firm Operations
obtained by focusing on these ancillary tasks. Each IT person likely has strengths and weaknesses. If you can organize the tasks such that a local IT
person is responsible for all of a region’s efforts in a particular area, or potentially even the global firm’s effort in a particular area, then that person can take his or her nonsupport time and spend it in that area. By using other local IT support to fill in the other areas that are needed in that local office, all aspects of technology can be covered. The benefit of proceeding this way is that you are minimizing redundant tasks, such as each office creating its own intranet system, or setting its own standards.
For example, if left to fill its own needs, each local office would likely create a document repository. This system would have features unique to that office and would likely have a unique platform. Electronic document sharing between the offices would be more difficult because the disparate systems would be difficult to integrate. Minimizing redundant tasks is likely the single biggest way that a large organization with multiple offices, especially smaller offices, can control costs and improve services.
Standards
The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
—Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Everything in life that’s easy is made easy because of standards. Standards and difficulty are inversely proportional. Plugging in your notebook computer is easy because we have a standard voltage and connector. Visit a different country and your life might be a bit more difficult. Your connector might not fit in the receptacle on the wall, so you would need an adaptor.
Luckily, there is a standard adaptor to bridge between two conf licting standards. Even then, the power supplied may be a different voltage, requiring you to use a transformer. If you did not have the adaptor or the transformer, you would not be able to connect. Your life would have been made more difficult as a result of lack of standardization. You should pay close attention to this simple concept throughout your technology enterprise.
That is not to say that everything should be standardized on a global basis.
Many standards simply do not lend themselves to global application, perhaps because they address local or regional issues or because they themselves depend on other standards that conf lict between geographic locations.
With standards comes a loss of control. For example, a program that deals specifically with U.S. taxes may not need to be a global standard, but rather a U.S.-based standard. Also, when rolling out a system globally, standards between locations may differ based on particular building codes or power configurations.