IT Management - Talk

Last week I was at Polytechnic University of Caceres giving a talk about IT Management and it was enjoyable to return to my University where I studied because I could speak with two of my former teachers who taught me Security and Project. This time my goal was to show how works the IT Management outside in the real world to students and future engineers.

Firstly we were talking about why we should have a Management System to deliver services. Today, IT has advanced dizzily and it is difficult to measure and improve without a proper IT Management, consequently we have to bring order to the chaos with policies and procedures if we want to make progress in our company.

Most companies need a lot of resources to make business and lots of technologies as well, therefore it is important to manage efficiently the resources if we don't want to waste it. This is the main reason of creating procedures and deliver services with a methodology because if we want to make big things like a bridge we will need manage resources, measure metrics and improve the life cycle of services. At the end we will have a product or service standardized with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) easily manageable, easily deliverable and easily improvable and it will always have the same quality because we were always following the same steps or procedures to deliver the services.

There are a lot of IT-related standards like ISO 20000, ITIL, Cobit, CMMI, ISO 27001, etc based in best practices that we can follow to improve our organization but we shouldn't forget that we can get a little bit of each of them to adapt them to our organization instead of getting one of them and follow strictly because maybe some processes aren't necessary to our company. With these standards IT departments will align with the business, and technologies will work for the business, thus we should adapt the technology to the business.

When I was talking about processes to students, they were a little weird because they don't understand adequately this abstract noun. I told them that if we always want to deliver a service in the same way with the same quality and without “surprise” we have to follow a set of steps to get the result. Sometimes these steps or procedures have to be changed because the board of directors change the strategy of our company or simply because they want to spread out the business with new products or services. In this moment, we will have to change the procedures and policies to adapt the processes and technology to the new strategy. This is like the new service of Amazon who wants to sell food, do you think they will have to adapt the technology to the new service? Of course, they'll do. Amazon will have to create new processes, policies and procedures to adapt the IT to the new service.

I hope students learned something new about IT Management in this talk because they will be the future engineers who will manage IT departments in big or small companies, it doesn't matter, the important thing is that they know how to manage an IT department regardless where they work. I'm glad to participate in this kind of initiatives to try to bring the real world to the University.

Best regards my friend and remember, if you have any question, go ahead!!

Gestion de las TI from dromerotrejo