Discussion on:

Get drastic: 15 IT best practices to kill

What am I missing on this point? Abandon level 1, 2 and 3 tech support? I can't agree or disagree without the elevator speech on this one.

elevator pitch: do you want to be customer focused, get rid of IT level 1,2,3 support ...
once allocated, an IT technician will solve your business problem ...

So, do I pay a team specialists to change user passwords or are the 1st, 2nd and 3rd line still there but invisible to the customer? ...and where are all these extra specialists going to come from?

... and how much more will it cost the company?

IMO Unless you level out support, you will get someone over and over fixing up a lost password; this is silly .. but levelled out, you might actually someone who thinks a bit longer, and should realize 'we get lots of these, why don't I create a secret question password reset', or the like. The next thing that will happen, is your team will actually learn more .. they have to deal with it, have to grow their skills - even if this is to suck it in, and ask. someone else for help.

And to add fuel to the fire, not just get rid of levels 1-3 and make it flat, but enforce double-jacking to get managers on the floor once a month, to see what it is really like. Let them do some calls, and see if they have resourced the support staff levels properly, see if the phones and PCs are sufficient, instead of ivory towers..

Wait... Am I suppose to eliminate abandoning... or simply abandon. The title says these are 15 things I'm suppose to eliminate, right? Can I suggest abandoning presentations with unclear call to actions?

I agree. So to spell this out, I need to:
1. Eliminate my efforts to "Reject annual mismatch between CEO priorities and IT???s most funded projects"
2.Eliminate my efforts to "Terminate support of projects that will not improve the income statement"
3. Eliminate my efforts to "Abandon CIO priorities that do not directly support CEO priorities"
4. Eliminate my efforts to "Stop recommending IT mega projects"
5. Eliminate my efforts to "Abolish environment of little or no IT spending accountability"
6. Eliminate my efforts to "Terminate existing applications that do not yield measurable business value"
7. Eliminate my efforts to "End the practice of placing enterprise IT spending within the CIO???s budget"
8. Eliminate my efforts to "Eliminate IT-caused business model disruption ???surprises???
9. Eliminate my efforts to "Eradicate ???cloud-a-phobia???
10. Eliminate my efforts to "Abandon level 1, 2, and 3 tech support"
11. Eliminate my efforts to "Cancel most IT chargeback systems"
12. Eliminate my efforts to "Cease issuing most competitive bids"
13. Eliminate my efforts to "Stop holding on to unfunded projects"
14. Eliminate my efforts to "End discrimination against behavioral skills and social sciences"
15. Eliminate my efforts to "Abandon IT???s unbalanced support between front and back office"

My favorite is number 8 - I can stop caring about outages. With the free time, I can help improve the bottom line some other way. Or I can use it to plan my disruptions so they're not a surprise!. Anyone have a good strategy to educate my internal customers...

We're a small IT department and the single biggest problem I have is users interrupting my train of concentration on a curly fault with a request to find the "Any" key.

That third level is specialists and there's some degree of isolation for a reason - being able to get things done.

Larger outfits with separate developer and helldesk pools would probably benefit from combining 'em and/or improving cross-pool communications but once you exceed a couple hundred staff there's a definite need to have a first line. The problem comes when the first line is hard to get past.

Usually, I just dismiss Gartner stuff out of hand, and the kind of junk that someone who spends all day talking to CXOs and never once did a day of honest work in the trenches comes up with. And almost always, that's an accurate assessment of Gartner. In this case, though, their analysis is surprisingly dead on. The problem is, getting from Point A to Point B is very difficult. These are cultural issues ingrained into most enterprises, and they aren't going away any time soon.

J.Ja

So much of this is off the mark, I must disagree with your comment

Items 1,2,3 of the `manifesto` would be a given in any enterprise. Item 4, is pap, as most incentives are already baked in. The incentive picked for next year, was a multiyear project with a 80% certainty of being completed in the target year.

#6 define that one. It could apply to anything.
#1,3,8 like duh.
#2 is a subtle joke. Most IT shops are a cost center in the enterprise. IT shops improve bottom line by reducing the expense line.
#7 is in conflict with #5. One of the sole powers that a CIO has is the ability to terminate funding.
#12 does not fit a reality of many businesses that are required by law to do so from regulatory bodies. And in the present American enterprise of any size that means darn near everyone.
Finally, like always, Gartner is thinking in terms that the IT shop is in total control of its environment. The reality is few if any shops are. I can take you to enterprises where the spending for IT related items/projects are as big as the IT shop itself.

If Gartner wanted to add value then they ought to define how most IT shops being a cost center are transformed into revenue generators so that they end up on the left side of the ledger. They won't of course, because they don't know how and never have. Gartner has long outlived its usefulness in being a guiding light. They have been stating the obvious for over a decade.

#2, 6 and 13: What if an application is used to increase worker productivity and the powers-that-be cannot be convinced of its value to the company or its "value" cannot be tied directly to an income statement. The reasons for most of the "15 practices to eliminate" are subjective and metrics cannot find the overall value to the enterprise. Also, who decides what has value?


#4: Could be a real problem if a "mega-project" is needed to re-vamp an old system or comply with a change in state or federal law.

#8: What is this supposed to mean? It's impossible to stop something unexpected.

#9: Not everyone needs to used the cloud.

#10: This would never work. Farming out tech support would cost much more in the long run, not to mention a frustration workers who would need to call half way across the world to report a system outage.

Abandon level 1, 2, and 3 tech support

Are you serious? explain how that is going to work in an enterprise environment?
who will provide help desk support? and who will provide the extended support needed when help desk have done all that they can?

I work in an enterprise environment of over 1500 employees.
Tell me who is going to deploy the deskphones and workstations when we have a new starter? who is going to talk to the employee about there issue and make them feel like someone is investing his or her time in the issue?

All this is doing is reinforcing that stigma the "IT Department" as always and and can never shake.

Think about what the end user also needs and not just go about cutting costs.

It is difficult enough to just get staff to do what we ask them to when trying to fix their IT issues.
Support jobs is being played down here as if it is so easy to do the job.
I like to see staff do IT support work...would you let a plumber do your electricity?

The setup may result in a very nice conduit install to run the electrical through. (I might have an electrition check over the wire connections after though of course..)

The result would be the electrician telling you that nothing is up to code, the entire thing needs to be pulled out and redone from scratch.

I worked for an enterprise company. In fact, I worked support for an IT software development group ... the people who design and write these great applications.

The Palm V had been approved for corporate use.

I spent more time installing Palms (PC software/sync) for these *DEVELOPERS* who couldn't make sense of the tri-fold pictured "read me first". And you want to discard support? Productivity would come to a crawl. Good luck making that bottom line.

SUPPORT IS A VALUE ADDED SERVICE, IT IS NOT JUST A COST. Many companies fail to grasp the importance of their support organizations in keeping customers around. End support, bye bye customers.

I agree that support is always an issue when budgets are reviewed. With cost-cutting we could only deploy Level 1 support which ends up putting pressure on the developers themselves and ultimately disrupting development which I was responsible for. I jumped in and managed all issues requiring Level 3 support but Level 1 always ends up being overwhelmed with nowhere to funnel all the issues requiring expert knowledge without giving additional training (and incurring additional costs) to the Level 1 support members which lands us back at square 1.

End-users support is always a "must" in my book because this yields the greatest return with immediate value for the client and needs to be re-thinked in terms of budgets and short-and-long term goals.

Some of this seems common sense, but I'm interested in the alternative proposed to level 1-3 systems. I'm from the trenches myself and have worked all 3 positions, and understand the basic concepts of ITIL.

From a HR/Money perspective, I am wondering how you merge level 1 and 3 without paying everyone at a level 3 rate. Typically these teams are pyramid shaped, with the very best being less numerous than the guys whose support is 80% "did you type your password correctly? Is it plugged in?".
Presently I work a role where all 3 are merged, but that is only viable when there are less than a few hundred individuals.
Then there is the matter of training. It is normal to train a level 3 staff member at great expense so that they are an expert with the enterprise vendor's solutions. Training every single staff member, or picking some staff over others, or creating a series of weak points (I know CISCO, but not Juniper and I need both to fix this!) doesn't seem cheap.

Yes, but, limiting a capable Tier Two from doing a "fix" merely because they are a Tier Two, but, otherwise capable is ludicrous, too.

Example, I a power user, have an issue with a security related app, it's not working. A Tier Two has Registry Access rights, but, has niether authority nor Install Source Access to fix the bug,

That has to go to a Tier Three... Or higher?

It's not always a pay issue... IT comes back to IT Security Paranoia needlessly segregating functionality because of a lack of trust.

If you can't trust your people get rid of them!

A few you can trust, at a higher pay level, is worth dozens you can't at any pay level!

....for sure. Sometimes security measures make sense, sometimes it's simply intentionally complicating things for the sake of egos. (Gotta have lots of tiers so I can have lots of staff.....build my empire.)

And honestly, that desire for power is the biggest obstacle of all for any improvement, regardless of what people think should be done, or even what we all agree should be done.

It looks inefficient, and can be. I've seen what happens when managers try to get rid of a peak/trough system. The troughs become flat peaks and the peaks become overtime. When you have multiple staff with the same job titles and similar pay, but wildly different work expectations based on their qualifications it leads to skill loss and poor morale. Plus overtime (when you have to replace them).

I realise I'm talking about what you might think of as the little day to day stuff, but bullet points need to be expanded at some point into policy. That is where dead projects and bloated systems come from. ITIL like system developed from a need. I meet a lot of people in I.T now who have pretty average technology skills. That wasn't possible before seperating the tiers. Skilled I.T people will always flee boring unchallenging tasks that underpay because they're being paid alongside those who are just entering the industry. Merging the tiers is like asking the CEO to do the work he hired others to do. Chances are, he can do it- he probably built the company afterall. Doesn't mean its a good way to use him.

All of that said, I like decentralising I.T. Usually there is a "tier 0"..someone amongst a team or department who isn't of I.T but experienced enough in the use of their business systems that they can assist their colleagues and escalated as needed- with the information in a format that makes I.T's response more accurate.

Your last point is very well taken, In a research study of IT help issues that my students and I did a few years back, we found that (a) probably close to all the "help" provided to organizational users was provided by fellow workers, either in their immediate area or nearby; (b) the quality of this help was rated as at least as good as that provided by IT help; (c) this was related to greater importance attached to familiarity with the work being done than to technology expertise; (d) almost all of this help was provided informally, usually without official acknowledgement or reward, simply because people like helping other people; and (e) where official attention was paid, it was more likely to be in the form of reproach rather than thanks, despite the fact that if all the burden of the informal help system were to be transferred to official IT help channels, the official system would swiftly collapse. The capacity of organizations to punish their people for undertaking the kind of organizational good citizenship behaviors that keep them afloat is endlessly amazing, no less in IT than in any other area of corporate activity.

So, it's all the "Bottom Line"?

Well, if there are no IT users... There would be no need for IT providers.

I agree the bottom line is important, because without a company IT users wouldn't have a job...

But, how about looking at things to "Kill" that impede the users productivity and creativity, when it supports the company?

How about "maiming" those IT protocols that impede keeping creative people on the payroll by making them so frustrated with IT services and uselesss IT hoops to jump through.

Malicious Users should be fired... Period... Untrainable/Unteachable IT users should also be fired.

Primary Log-In access rights should be tailored to the users function in the company not some IT security Paranoiacs One Size Fits All and no users can be trusted attitude.

Lastly, don't trust the cloud, if you don't "own" it... You don't control it...

And, pyhsical security is still the best security available.

Also if your internet connection goes down so does the cloud. Can your business stop just because the internet does?

Businesses exist to make money, companies which are quoted in the stock market exist to create value for their shareholders. I have long held the view that IT should either be facilitating the making of money or the cutting of costs in order to effect the bottom line. The problem is IT often gets too focused on technology, the most fundamental conflict in all phases of the ITSM Lifecycle is between the view of IT as a set of IT services (the external business view) and the view of IT as a set of technology components (internal IT view). The bottom line is - ???People do not want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.???
However to this I would now add compliance as another fundamental focus for IT, certainly in the finance environment, Federal and SOX compliance are critical.

Businesses exist to make money by selling something of value. Ignore your customers at your peril. IT provides value for budget invested in it. Try running a business without it. IT has recognized that it's a service for a very long time now. You need quarter inch drills to make those quarter inch holes.

Brilliant idea to abandon them. They should never form part of the IT budget. If a user needs support it should be 'purchased as a service'. In theory the individual IT support people could still be there, but responding only when support services have been purchased. A line manager is going to get people to buck up quickly when the same user over and over costs the department ??15-??20 a time to have their password changed. In the same vein, if there is a real issue with software that is persistently cropping up, your IT issue will be flagged up faster if someone is paying for issues to be resolved that aren't their problem.

Since you seem very cloud centred, (option 9 ), and I feel that 9 and 10 go hand in hand. I can see you would want the death of the IT department. With users knowing more and more about basic functionality on their systems, and IT stuff in general resetting passwords will become more rare. Level 1 will be replaced by machines that can re image themselves, and restore to previous point becoming the norm for issues. Lifting boxes of new PCs, replacing HDDs, etc can be done by vendors.
To close down Level 2-3 would require more secure SLAs and SaaS being more than it is right now.
14. End discrimination against behavioral skills and social sciences. LoL, never, I enjoy oppressing my users.

"users knowing more and more about basic functionality on their systems" - excuse please the tears of mirth. Users are and will remain clueless, say what you like. For every one who "knows more" there are a hundred who have the know-how of a potato.

Can do a lot of harm. I've had users ask me to put in my admin credentials and complained that it was necessary at all.
Sure, I might spend less time explaining how a desktop works, but I spend as much time explaining why its bad to establish a vpn to someone's home PC. If anything, 'savvy' users are just as unhappy with business computers as the unsavvy were with the devil machines. Its just the reasons that change.

They always say that entropy tends towards chaos naturally.
These ideas will certainly speed it up.

just curious how all this applies to not for profit systems such as healthcare or community service organizations, libraries, government agencies.
I understand CIOs and CEOs should always work to improve the financial situation of the entity, but where is the line between profitability and purpose ?
this reminds me somewhat of ancient Mesopotamia,
greed and the lack of investment in a sustainable future turned the rich fertile crescent into a desert.
So the stock holders are not making record profits,guess we better bleed what we can out of it until the whole thing crumbles to dust.....
My parents who made it through the great depression - profit is not always the most rewarding goal.

1,5,6,11,12,13 All make sense. They help streamline what we do. Number 5 would be so welcome. Why do management pay a consultant $50k typically for something one of their senior IT staff could answer. 15 Seems to contradict 10, and speaking of eliminating Level 1 - 3 Support, I wonder how this guy and CIO's, or even Director's would cope if their level 1 - 3 support were cut, meaning all their middle management. They would either have to deal with every little detail of every project, application, and Infrastructure architecture, design, implementation, support, and staffing issues or empower the employees to make their own decisions about how the CIO's and CEO's direction should be carried out. Come to think of it, this may not be a bad idea. Imagine the business savings if all the middle management and upper management positions were eliminated, and bonuses saved. We may be finally heard if we just have to listen to each other.

Improve the financial conditions of an enterprise? Eliminate manifesto #4. Weren't they hired to do that?

I love the way "enlightened thinkers" set policy with slogans and bullet points. If one good slogan could cure our problems, we'd be free of all burdens by now by applying the proper amounts of "Hope and Change". If one good bullet list could solve our problems, Gartner would have cured the world's ills a thousand times over.

The truth is that things in "IT" are the way they are because they have organically developed to meet the needs of everyday life. Yet there are those who want to put IT into a box. At one extreme are those that think the box is "Expense - the necessary evil" at the other extreme are those who think the box is "Income - IT needs to produce revenue". No one who acts as a CxO consultant seems to grasp the idea that it's both, and more than both because "IT" has become the catch-all for things that no one else can, or knows how to, or can be trusted, to do.

The first step in "fixing IT" is to do a needs analysis. As many have already questioned, what about the user? What about setups? Training? There is a need for all of these. Plan accordingly and budget accordingly to meet them.

There is also a need for process improvement in various levels of the administrative functions in both for-profit and non-profit companies. PROPER application of technology to actually improve the process increases efficiency of those functions and saves the company money.

There is also the need for constant analysis of the profit and pitfalls for a company to adopt any new technology or hold on to old technology. A Dell approach is the right approach for most companies - don't be too quick to jump on the bandwagon for any technology, let others suffer with the teething and growing pains, when it's clear what benefit can be derived be ready to adopt (at which time there will be more true experts with the technology to assist with more comptetitive rates).

Too often CxOs practice what I call "management by magazine". They read an article, maybe one that touts a (distant) competitor employing some great new technology to their benefit. Articles, like mainstream media, are not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They are adulterated pieces designed to air the opinion of the writer, or the publishing company they work for, or the advertiser/investor who supports them. The CIO position can't afford to fall into that trap. It must not be shoehorned into it by yet another "consultant", speaker, journalist or powerpoint presenter.

Not enough room for the rest of the soapbox - but as an IT manager who has seen it go from the guys in the backroom who do the magic with the big systems that finance uses, to adding it to all levels of manufacturing, warehousing, and supply, to supporting every function and every person in the company who has an electronic device that generates, transfers, or uses information, I can tell you it's not something that can be decided in the boardroom as a line item on the company P&L.

Very well said.

Your comment here:

Too often CxOs practice what I call "management by magazine".

...is in line with my comment about "CEO-centric" direction of IT. I know this type, most of the CEOs I have worked with based their decisions on the "everyone else is doing it that way" principle.

# Abandon CIO priorities that do not directly support CEO priorities

CIOs are stupid and just want to do their own thing. CEOs all excel at their jobs and have never caused trouble for any business, right? (And not just with respect to IT.) Things were going so swimmingly through the '70s, but the IT monster was growing and destroying everything.

Hint: Business created IT. Each business creates its own IT department.