10 Hot Issues in It Management free essay sample

Assignment 1: 10 Hot IT Issues Review David C. Johnson Capella University MBA 6180- Managing Information Assets and Technology Professor Danielle Babb February 27, 2011 The author provides a very in depth look at the landscape of the IT environment. He identifies 10 key ideas that members of the IT community will need to focus on in the coming years. Looking at this article from the perspective of a manager and a leader in an IT organization I am inclined to agree with Kanter’s assertions. 1. Electronic Commerce revisited: the Internet and beyond Despite the fact that the internet bubble burst and there was a time where even thinking about starting a business based on the internet would get you laughed out of a business meeting E-commerce has continued to expand and produce new and better ways of doing business across the world via the internet. The perfect example of this is the increase in online ordering over the holidays. This year I did not set foot in a single store over the holiday season choosing instead to place orders for all of my Christmas gifts through online vendors like amazon. om or my favorite stores online portal. 2. Web services to support internal and external collaboration I whole-heartedly agree with this assertion as well. When I look into the cloud based services like Salesforce. com and the upcoming office 365. The focus of many of our largest software manufacturers has been to deliver full on solutions for business problems over the Internet. Now a day’s customer can check live inventory at vendor locations, we can track delivery times and make changes to our orders on the fly via the internet. Thanks to delivery. om I can now order my lunch via a web app on my Iphone. Things like Google Apps allows for the editing of a single document by multiple participants in real time. How can you be more collaborative then this? The online aspect of this destroys the need for employ ees to be centrally located. IN many organizations in fact they have begun to do away with the classic office set up. Choosing instead to allow employees to telecommute and having a few flex offices that can be used by multiple individuals who need them when they have to physically be in the office. 3. Customer Centricity- I think that Customer Centricity is becoming a more prevalent issue in the IT community. Overall I feel like there has been a greater emphasis on human interaction. Where as in the past few years it was 7 number presses to get to a human being I have found that this has changed in the recent times to allow for easier access to customer service reps. 4. Outsourcing and Insourcing the role of Project Management In this economy in particular the mix between having in house expertise and bringing in a consultant for a given task is often close to 50/50. I know in my organization a great deal of our spend is based on bringing in consultants or outside organization to manage functions that we do not have the capability to manage. This puts added stress and strain on the project management organization that are now tasked with managing an outside organization that they have no real control over. It’s also the PMO’s responsibility to ensure the consultant complies and lives within the confines of the given statement of work or contract. Having this responsibility placed on someone who is not necessarily trained for it has its own consequences and repercussions. . The Value Chain Reaches out If a business is the sum total of a collection of business processes then the supporting processes have to gain fuller advantage and ease of access through better use of Information technology. The Value chain has been the clear winner in the software boon of the past few years. Information management, knowledge management, CRM, Supply chain and thousands of other functions have been improved and to a point automated by the growth of the software market. 6. IT Infrastructure: Don’t forget telecom and security The infrastructure of an organization has to be flexible enough to allow for growth both in company size and in functionality. Many organizations find themselves in situations where the systems that had worked for them as little as two years ago are no longer sufficient to handle the operations of today. In recent years, I have been with organizations that have had to go through whole scale rebuilding of their storage facilities because they did not account for the number of emails and documents that they would be forced to store to comply with SEC or Sarbanes Oxley regulations. Knowledge management- In this time when competitive advantage is so hard to come by because everyone can buy the same tools, the combination of knowledge , processes and the people to perform the processes is the only thing that separates one company from another. 7. The Full understanding and positioning of IT in the organization The value of IT in an organization is the difference between an IT department that keeps the computers on and a serious business partner that can be used to enable an organization to thrive. IN many organizations the CIO reports directly to the CEO and has a direct line to a decision maker. These organizations understand the importance of the CIO position and value it as well. The IT organization is thought of as an integral part of defining and building a business process. 8. Aligning IT strategy with business strategy To restate the obvious in many organizations the job of IT is to support the business function. IT strategy revolves around successfully supplementing business processes with technology. I agree that this is a hot issue in IT but less so in recent years. When the importance of It to the success of an organization has become more viable in the eyes of upper management and the business people in general. . IT still needs people skilled and motivated We are in the information age, as such the importance of the IT organization is only going to grow. We need people who are able to grow and change with the times and the technology. IT will need individuals with a variety of skills to help align IT strategy with Business strategy. I believe this article is dire ctly related to the concept of this course in that it provides some insight into the minds of IT executives and prepares us for what could very well be our future. The Article focuses on the issues that we as managers will likely be faced with when we begin or continue our careers. In my experience this article hits the nail right on the head. Over the years IT organizations have grown in importance as the complexity of the environments within which we work change and grow. I think the article could have been improved with an update, I think the changes to many organizations since this article has been written could change the authors mind about many.