Quick overview: opinions of over 350 Indiana chief executives from all areas of the state and from a wide range of manufacturing, service, and not-for-profit organizations captured in this survey. Link to the survey overview and results: http://www.inceosurvey.com/2009_results/
Lots of interesting information and I pulled this info to share and comment on:
Section 6: Information Technology
1. Over 60 percent of respondents indicated their company has no method for monitoring the amount of time employees spend on the Internet, and over 75 percent indicated their company has no formal policy on employee-authored blogs.
2. There is only weak agreement that executives are able to monitor the productivity of their IT staffs, or that they are able to evaluate their IT leaders.
3. "Production/maintenance of company Web site" and "server maintenance" are the only IT functions which emerge as having a "likelihood of outsourcing" that rises above the scale midpoint.
#1 bodes well for Compendium Blogware out of Indianapolis. It is so simple and inexpensive for a monitoring tool to be installed. Not sure why this isn't happening, and we made this recommendation a stern request in a recent letter to our clients - see: http://blogs.xrbs.com/managing-your-information-technology/smb-internet-usage-alert
#2 Business leaders cannot evaluate IT Leaders. There is a tremendous shortage of competent business and IT trained individuals to lead and manage. A smart business leader reads a book or an article finding the right "questions to ask" your IT staffer. Yet, the business leader can't evaluate the answer. Business leaders can't call "BS" or dig deeper to ferret out miss-information. (Business can't hold IT accountable, as they can't audit the IT work).
I talk after about how SMB business owners can't hold their IT staff accountable. When you outsource accountability is the service vendors’ responsibility. This should be part of your interview questions, "How do you hold your IT Staff accountable?" If you don't know the answer, ping me and I'll share 1-on-1.
#3 There are three core areas of an IT department: help desk, applications, infrastructure. Applications are where you create a competitive advantage for the business (process, workflow, one-click, etc). You are likely to want to own what gives you a competitive advantage. Infrastructure, you want to outsource that to a service provider that can use operation excellence to manage and maintain it. Maintenance is repetitive, boring, detail oriented. Sr. IT staff won't do maintenance, and business leaders are ignorant of the issue (can't hold IT accountable, as they can't audit the IT work). Help desk, outsource or insource based on volume.
What do you think?? Can you manage your IT staff? How do you hold them accountable?
