Don't Make These IT Mistakes in Your Organisation

Top signs you work in a dysfunctional IT environment 

Learn from these real-life examples of less-than best practices, performed both by IT organizations and IT pro

We’ve all worked at “that place,” where processes weren’t followed, best practices were unheard of, and dysfunctional rhythms and routines were the law of the land. In some ways, these experiences can be our greatest teacher, providing an object lesson in how things are not supposed to work.
    
Here are some real-life examples of less-than best practices, performed both by IT organizations and IT pros themselves, as well as the lessons that can be learned from them.

An IT professional’s work life can feel like a never-ending series of crises, thanks to the sheer volume of user requests that pour in on any given day. However, continually operating in fire-drill mode is not a good thing.
Steve Aponte, who is currently program director at Intelligent Product Solutions, can relate. At a former job, IT was bombarded with urgent phone calls for end users whose desktop and mobile devices were failing. 

A best practice is to use a hardware/software inventory system that tracks on a weekly basis when laptops will hit the anniversary of their warranty expiring. “IT needs to take a step back and strategize on preventing things from happening that need a fast response,” he says.

With today’s fast-changing technologies, organizations value IT professionals who are on the cutting edge. But failing to share that knowledge, or even the technologies themselves, can be a problem. This is the situation Ken Piddington faced when he served as consultant several years ago on a project to design a new transactional operations system.

Piddington, now CIO at MRE Consulting, had just finishing up a demonstration when the head of operations pulled him aside and expressed concern that his team wouldn’t be able to use the system. “I asked, `Why – was it too complicated?’ He said no, that they wouldn’t be able to see the screens on their monitors, as they were too small.” He took me to where he sat, and there was this tiny, ancient 13-inch monitor.

Meanwhile, the IT director’s office was like a different world. “It looked like he was flying a plane, with a 22-inch monitor – when that was a rarity – a cool new phone, a PDA, a tablet, all this stuff,” Piddington says.

The IT workers simply had better equipment than everyone else. “They were being the keepers of the technology kingdom and not educating the user community on what was available to help them do their jobs,” he says. It’s certainly common for IT to stay a step ahead of users by testing out cutting-edge technologies and running prototypes, he says, but “it was as if they were keeping the rest of the organization in the dark.”

In the startup world, where the focus is on speed to market, processes can often fall to the wayside; in fact, a lack of mature processes is more often the rule than the exception, he says. Meanwhile, in the mid-market, processes might be well defined, but organizations find themselves bending those processes and pulling resources from core tasks to accommodate customer requests from the sales side.

Lastly, in enterprise-class businesses, siloed work environments can deter technology professionals from being exposed to multiple areas of the business or to new technologies that are being implemented.

IT World:http://http://bit.ly/1ODBjkp