Small IT needs structure TOO!

There is much buzz in the IT community about Service Delivery and frameworks, ITIL, COBIT and even Six Sigma are at the forefront. These are all excellent methods for improving the IT organization and aligning IT with the business, but are they appropriate for the small business? How do you implement ITIL if you are 20 person IT staff?

Small organizations can implement the spirit of these full fledged frameworks without being burdened by the weighty process inherehent in them. So where does one begin? Small organizations have to maximize there IT dollar, hence the goal of IT should be to provide a stable platform to do normal business operations, most of these processes don't contribute to a competitive advantage and aren't part of the core business. Applications like accounting, order processing, and inventory managment are commodity items and should be purchased out of the box. Take your time in selecting the right package and don't make customizations, adapt your process to the application. There are a scores of applications available that are relatively inexpensive, and have years of development behind them, you are not going to significantly improve on there overall performance.

If you are going to do software development, only do it when it contributes to the competitive advantage. Remember most software projects fail! I have never worked at an organization where the custom software apps have been delivered consitently on time, and within budget. Software development eats away at the precious resources of the small IT budget.

Infrastructure is another area where there is not a tremendous advantage. Put in good solid products, don't scrimp on quality, but don't do technology for technology's sake! Put you energy into figuring out the most efficent processes for your organization. When the issue is well defined, the soluton is doable. Find local vendors who can augment your staff with the high end resources you only need occasionaly, small firms rarely need a CCIE on staff, but paying for one's services when your are doing a network upgrade can save you lot's of moeny in the long run.

Capture what is going on in your organization, the IT help desk is the hub of IT communication. Once again there are a number of inexpensive tools to track tickets and distribute work. Review your critical issues on a daily basis, and look for repeat offenders. Utilize your ticket database to do reporting, this will tell you what is going on in your organization.

Monitor everything! Make it part of your infrastucture build to enable montitoring. Once again there are free tools available that will tell you exactly what is going on in your enviroment, and notify you when problems arise or are about to occur.

Manage change. Many small organizations feel that they can not take the time to do change management, this couldn't be farther from the truth. Remember most outages are caused by something IT changed. Start with a simple process, if it is longer than one page, it is too long.

These are just a few tips, upcoming posts will dive into detail on these steps and provide some specific examples.