CIO or how to build an IT department of the organization
One fine day you, from a simple system administrator in a large organization, “grow up” to the head of a department / department / information technology unit. By modern standards, this position in the enterprise hierarchy is called - CIO or Chief Information Offier. A person holding this position does not just treat people with the letter C - his right actions and decisions in the modern world allow companies to survive and thrive. Information technologies have penetrated so much into all aspects of modern life that if an organization is unable to apply them effectively, then most likely it will not be able to compete and will be unprofitable and unprofitable. The tasks that face the CIO or, in our opinion, IT director, are in many ways strategic and critical for the main business processes of large and medium-sized companies.
In this article I would like to highlight the main problems that I see when organizing the work of IT departments in completely different companies, and also try to understand how to properly organize the work of the IT department so that it is as efficient as possible for the entire enterprise and allows the company not only to survive, but to look for New market niches and opportunities that others simply cannot reach due to technological backwardness.
Often in newspapers, magazines, articles on the Internet you read about the work of the CIO, and it seems that he is only engaged in buying equipment, looking for employees, receiving indigestible instructions from top management that he is trying to fulfill. Seeing in real organizations how IT directors work, it is often necessary to see that these specialists lack specific technical and organizational knowledge and skills that allow them to effectively manage all the department’s staff and the whole complex of software and hardware that are under the jurisdiction of IT. Without particularly delving into the skills of establishing communications, time management, negotiation, conflict resolution, which are necessary for any manager and to whom many specialized books and courses are devoted, let's focus on the specific skills and knowledge necessary for the CIO.
The first thing I would like to highlight is the knowledge of information and communication technologies at the highest level . The head of the IT department should not just understand what the staff are talking about and what they do, but see the underlying processes in IT work, understand the causal relationships in the organization of all work. In modern conditions, where IT department employees are often on the crest of scientific and technological progress, each day gaining new knowledge and understanding new technologies that are being developed around the world and accessible through the global web, the manager risks plunging into administrative matters and loses understanding everything that happens in the department, its authority among employees as an expert and leader, and those invisible strings that motivate people to go ahead and take new frontiers in their work. One of the common mistakes of IT managers, which one has to see, is the insufficient analysis of the product, on which subordinate employees in the company or third-party companies work. This translates into an underdeveloped product, vague technical specifications, the reluctance of developers and engineers to give their all to the fullest, so it will do. That is, work and services are being carried out at the formal level, and the desired effect is not achieved. The head often cannot speak concretely with the product developers, draw some ideological line, since he does not understand most of the details. The second big problem in this situation, I see, is that CIO does not have a specific vision of the product when it is accepted. Suppose you ordered a web site from a developer’s company and are completely unaware of web technologies. You have been provided with a product with beautiful pictures and texts that you provided to the performer. It seems to be all, the order is completed and you can expect a marketing effect and attracting new customers from the Internet, but in fact it turns out that the content is too cumbersome and the target audience of the page opens very slowly, as a result of which users simply do not wait for the full page load and leave from the website.
')
What, first of all, allows the CIO to be on horseback is not trivial, but it is the knowledge, skills, experience and vision in the field of IT , which allows to lead employees, as well as the organization as a whole. Modern technologies are developing unimaginably rapidly, what was an innovation a few years ago is now becoming obsolete and cannot be used for effective work. The number and range of emerging technologies is growing exponentially, some new products are suitable for us to use, and some are unacceptable or cannot be used for a number of reasons. So a few years ago, thundering public cloud technologies are often unacceptable for an organization, due to the possibility of foreign intelligence services or other agencies accessing their data. However, such things as typing skills in the blind, knowledge of the English language, understanding the basics of programming and scripting languages, knowledge of the operation of the Linux and Windows operating systems are necessary for almost every information technology specialist and allow specialists to understand and speak among themselves the same language. In today's fast-paced world, for a CIO organization, it is simply vital to constantly learn and draw new knowledge in order not to remain outside the board of technical progress and to be of value to the organization in which it works.
The second thing I would like to emphasize in the work of the Director of Information Technologies is the complex documentation of the entire IT infrastructure of an enterprise with methods for working with specific software and hardware . Very rare companies use documentation of IT infrastructure at a somewhat normal level so that you can quickly get information on the work of one or another IT component. As a rule, these are large multinational companies with already established business processes in IT departments using ITIL and ISO 20000 procedures. However, according to my observations, there are very few such organizations, and even large multinational companies often organize IT work without applying high standards and norms.
A lot of problems arising in the operation of IT infrastructure could be easily solved with the availability of competent documentation that describes the processes and organization of subsystems. However, during the implementation and modernization work, the documentation is not written, over time, details of how certain subsystems work are forgotten, and when something stops working at an inconvenient time, employees start to fuss and try to re-understand how it works. For example, the telephone system or how the servers are connected to the storage system. Such problems are constantly observed in various organizations. For many IT departments, this is chronic and people live from problem to problem. If the organization is left by a responsible specialist who is responsible for a certain complex IT subsystem and nobody else has worked with it, then after his dismissal the new employee faces many nuances and trifles, not knowing which can lead to idle times in the system’s work or even damage it. Beginner and even already operating CIO should pay special attention to documenting the work of IT subsystems. In my opinion, one of the first things to do when starting this position as an IT director is to take an inventory of existing documentation and make every effort to document the work of the IT subsystems of the organization. This allows you to create a knowledge base, based on which you can avoid many commonplace problems in working with information systems.
The next important point that every CIO should consider is the alignment of backup systems in particular, and fault tolerance systems in general . The backup system can be, as with many high-tech automated software and hardware components, and banal manual copying of data, but it should be in one form or another. Its absence and careless attitude to backups lead to disastrous consequences, as evidenced by constant examples from life. Cases of loss of data in a particular organization are not often, but such cases can reduce the work of the whole enterprise for a large period of time to zero and threaten with huge fines and disruptions in work. Ordinary employees of the IT department, as a rule, do not think about such problems, trying to carry out projects and tasks that are interesting to them and to launch this or that solution into work. The responsibility of the IT director on the uninterrupted long-term operation of these solutions, and the early planning and implementation of a strategy for data integrity and resiliency of all systems. IT director should think about these problems from the very first day of his work, which will ensure the vitality of both the entire IT complex and the organization as a whole.
The fourth important activity of the IT Director is the organization of an integrated system for monitoring equipment, software, and processes taking place in the entire information and communication complex . The presence of such a system allows you to monitor the vital parameters of all components of IT systems, identify emerging problems, often predict the possible occurrence of a particular problem in advance, analyze the workload of available resources and plan the expansion and purchase of the necessary equipment and software in advance. Quite often there are cases of failure of the hard drive, loss of power or some other minor emergency situations that by themselves can not cause serious consequences. However, inadequate monitoring and the lack of corrective actions on the part of operating staff lead to data loss, inoperability of equipment and software. Taking into account modern means of communication available to almost every person - the monitoring system allows you to respond almost instantly if necessary. So you can create a bot in Telegram, create a group of responsible employees and force the bot to send important messages about infrastructure problems to the chat. Even while on holiday at a beach in Thailand, you can monitor important events through messages in the Telegram. The monitoring system for the IT director is his eyes on the processes, available technological resources and what happens to them. The better and fuller it is configured and functioning, the wider the eyes of the head of the IT department.
The fifth point that the heads of IT departments often do not pay attention to is the development of professional skills of ordinary IT employees . In many organizations, it is believed that the employee, when he comes to work, should already have the knowledge to carry out his duties, training and obtaining some additional knowledge is considered as a third-level task. However, as practice shows, such a strategy leads to demotivation of employees, an outflow of the most promising specialists and the settling of incompetent people in the company. As I saw on numerous examples in various organizations, the weaker and unprofessional employees of the IT department, the more they are dependent on suppliers and contractors, which often results in excessive spending on IT solutions, which with a professional approach could be implemented by much cheaper means and completely in other ways. The stronger the team at CIO, the less dependent on external organizations and structures. With an increase in the professionalism of the staff as a whole, the quality of work of all IT subsystems improves, downtime and problem situations decrease. In fact, the work of IT specialists is purely intellectual, which is not served by any banal motivation. Often, the performance of two different people in the same IT position may differ by tens. I believe that the IT director should create for his subordinates such conditions in which each of them will be able to maximize their potential in the workplace, which is a win-win strategy for both the employer and the employee. Every kind of encouragement in teaching new technologies and obtaining professional skills and knowledge in the IT industry is one of the main motivators for employees.
The penultimate point that I would like to touch on in the article concerns the creation of certain indicators by which you can monitor and analyze the performance of people and software hardware . One of the powerful tools for analysis, and simply for direct work in the IT department is the incident management system. Besides the fact that it allows solving complex technological problems with the involvement of specialists from different directions, it also allows to give excellent analytics on the time needed to resolve the incident, to determine system downtime, causes and consequences of these downtimes. The work of such a system is beautifully painted up and down in the documentation of ITIL, and in one form or another is used in many large organizations. However, it is the analytics of the data of this system, together with the analytics of the monitoring system data, allow us to estimate the KPI work of employees, departments, technological subsystems, as well as to make forecasts and make adjustments to increase the productivity of the IT department.
If everything that was described before in the publication mostly refers to the operation and maintenance of the existing infrastructure at the proper level, then there is one direction of the IT director’s activity, which is connected with the development of infrastructure and the introduction of new technologies. No organization that wants to remain competitive in the market of its country, not to mention the global market, can not afford to miss the scientific and technological progress in the field of information technology. Here I would like to advise CIO to look for and try new technologies that give a noticeable advantage in work, allow to solve specific problems in work and give an increase in labor productivity in the whole organization . The question of the increase in labor productivity in the implementation of new IT systems, from my point of view, is one of the key when considering new solutions. Besides the fact that the IT director needs to see and consider in detail the new promising technology, the important thing is to choose the right manufacturer of this product or service who can provide decent quality at an affordable price. Very often there are solutions that are released raw for sale, and are extremely slowly being finalized afterwards. It is very important at the earliest stages to identify this and understand whether the organization is able to put up with it and whether it is not worthwhile to prefer some other solution. So for example, once you have found a suitable virtualization solution, you can safely use it throughout the organization in all projects, find a suitable database management system - you can not think about other DBMS for a long time, etc. The experience and knowledge gained in the implementation of new solutions should be scaled and applied as widely as possible throughout the organization.
Summarizing everything written in this article, we can say that the CIO to build reliable work of the IT department should focus on the following things:
Focusing on these areas in their work, the CIO, within its authority, will give a powerful impetus to the development of the organization as a whole. We have reviewed aspects specific to the information technology industry. However, like any manager, the CIO will need to address issues with the financing of the department, the loyalty of senior management, without which it is impossible to implement any worthwhile and large-scale projects, search and retain employees, which is a headache for any manager. We in this article did not consciously touch upon these aspects, leaving them for specialized literature and courses.
In this article I would like to highlight the main problems that I see when organizing the work of IT departments in completely different companies, and also try to understand how to properly organize the work of the IT department so that it is as efficient as possible for the entire enterprise and allows the company not only to survive, but to look for New market niches and opportunities that others simply cannot reach due to technological backwardness.
Often in newspapers, magazines, articles on the Internet you read about the work of the CIO, and it seems that he is only engaged in buying equipment, looking for employees, receiving indigestible instructions from top management that he is trying to fulfill. Seeing in real organizations how IT directors work, it is often necessary to see that these specialists lack specific technical and organizational knowledge and skills that allow them to effectively manage all the department’s staff and the whole complex of software and hardware that are under the jurisdiction of IT. Without particularly delving into the skills of establishing communications, time management, negotiation, conflict resolution, which are necessary for any manager and to whom many specialized books and courses are devoted, let's focus on the specific skills and knowledge necessary for the CIO.
Knowledge of the highest standard
The first thing I would like to highlight is the knowledge of information and communication technologies at the highest level . The head of the IT department should not just understand what the staff are talking about and what they do, but see the underlying processes in IT work, understand the causal relationships in the organization of all work. In modern conditions, where IT department employees are often on the crest of scientific and technological progress, each day gaining new knowledge and understanding new technologies that are being developed around the world and accessible through the global web, the manager risks plunging into administrative matters and loses understanding everything that happens in the department, its authority among employees as an expert and leader, and those invisible strings that motivate people to go ahead and take new frontiers in their work. One of the common mistakes of IT managers, which one has to see, is the insufficient analysis of the product, on which subordinate employees in the company or third-party companies work. This translates into an underdeveloped product, vague technical specifications, the reluctance of developers and engineers to give their all to the fullest, so it will do. That is, work and services are being carried out at the formal level, and the desired effect is not achieved. The head often cannot speak concretely with the product developers, draw some ideological line, since he does not understand most of the details. The second big problem in this situation, I see, is that CIO does not have a specific vision of the product when it is accepted. Suppose you ordered a web site from a developer’s company and are completely unaware of web technologies. You have been provided with a product with beautiful pictures and texts that you provided to the performer. It seems to be all, the order is completed and you can expect a marketing effect and attracting new customers from the Internet, but in fact it turns out that the content is too cumbersome and the target audience of the page opens very slowly, as a result of which users simply do not wait for the full page load and leave from the website.
')
What, first of all, allows the CIO to be on horseback is not trivial, but it is the knowledge, skills, experience and vision in the field of IT , which allows to lead employees, as well as the organization as a whole. Modern technologies are developing unimaginably rapidly, what was an innovation a few years ago is now becoming obsolete and cannot be used for effective work. The number and range of emerging technologies is growing exponentially, some new products are suitable for us to use, and some are unacceptable or cannot be used for a number of reasons. So a few years ago, thundering public cloud technologies are often unacceptable for an organization, due to the possibility of foreign intelligence services or other agencies accessing their data. However, such things as typing skills in the blind, knowledge of the English language, understanding the basics of programming and scripting languages, knowledge of the operation of the Linux and Windows operating systems are necessary for almost every information technology specialist and allow specialists to understand and speak among themselves the same language. In today's fast-paced world, for a CIO organization, it is simply vital to constantly learn and draw new knowledge in order not to remain outside the board of technical progress and to be of value to the organization in which it works.
Documentation solves
The second thing I would like to emphasize in the work of the Director of Information Technologies is the complex documentation of the entire IT infrastructure of an enterprise with methods for working with specific software and hardware . Very rare companies use documentation of IT infrastructure at a somewhat normal level so that you can quickly get information on the work of one or another IT component. As a rule, these are large multinational companies with already established business processes in IT departments using ITIL and ISO 20000 procedures. However, according to my observations, there are very few such organizations, and even large multinational companies often organize IT work without applying high standards and norms.
A lot of problems arising in the operation of IT infrastructure could be easily solved with the availability of competent documentation that describes the processes and organization of subsystems. However, during the implementation and modernization work, the documentation is not written, over time, details of how certain subsystems work are forgotten, and when something stops working at an inconvenient time, employees start to fuss and try to re-understand how it works. For example, the telephone system or how the servers are connected to the storage system. Such problems are constantly observed in various organizations. For many IT departments, this is chronic and people live from problem to problem. If the organization is left by a responsible specialist who is responsible for a certain complex IT subsystem and nobody else has worked with it, then after his dismissal the new employee faces many nuances and trifles, not knowing which can lead to idle times in the system’s work or even damage it. Beginner and even already operating CIO should pay special attention to documenting the work of IT subsystems. In my opinion, one of the first things to do when starting this position as an IT director is to take an inventory of existing documentation and make every effort to document the work of the IT subsystems of the organization. This allows you to create a knowledge base, based on which you can avoid many commonplace problems in working with information systems.
Backups, backups, backups
The next important point that every CIO should consider is the alignment of backup systems in particular, and fault tolerance systems in general . The backup system can be, as with many high-tech automated software and hardware components, and banal manual copying of data, but it should be in one form or another. Its absence and careless attitude to backups lead to disastrous consequences, as evidenced by constant examples from life. Cases of loss of data in a particular organization are not often, but such cases can reduce the work of the whole enterprise for a large period of time to zero and threaten with huge fines and disruptions in work. Ordinary employees of the IT department, as a rule, do not think about such problems, trying to carry out projects and tasks that are interesting to them and to launch this or that solution into work. The responsibility of the IT director on the uninterrupted long-term operation of these solutions, and the early planning and implementation of a strategy for data integrity and resiliency of all systems. IT director should think about these problems from the very first day of his work, which will ensure the vitality of both the entire IT complex and the organization as a whole.
Monitoring
The fourth important activity of the IT Director is the organization of an integrated system for monitoring equipment, software, and processes taking place in the entire information and communication complex . The presence of such a system allows you to monitor the vital parameters of all components of IT systems, identify emerging problems, often predict the possible occurrence of a particular problem in advance, analyze the workload of available resources and plan the expansion and purchase of the necessary equipment and software in advance. Quite often there are cases of failure of the hard drive, loss of power or some other minor emergency situations that by themselves can not cause serious consequences. However, inadequate monitoring and the lack of corrective actions on the part of operating staff lead to data loss, inoperability of equipment and software. Taking into account modern means of communication available to almost every person - the monitoring system allows you to respond almost instantly if necessary. So you can create a bot in Telegram, create a group of responsible employees and force the bot to send important messages about infrastructure problems to the chat. Even while on holiday at a beach in Thailand, you can monitor important events through messages in the Telegram. The monitoring system for the IT director is his eyes on the processes, available technological resources and what happens to them. The better and fuller it is configured and functioning, the wider the eyes of the head of the IT department.
Employee development
The fifth point that the heads of IT departments often do not pay attention to is the development of professional skills of ordinary IT employees . In many organizations, it is believed that the employee, when he comes to work, should already have the knowledge to carry out his duties, training and obtaining some additional knowledge is considered as a third-level task. However, as practice shows, such a strategy leads to demotivation of employees, an outflow of the most promising specialists and the settling of incompetent people in the company. As I saw on numerous examples in various organizations, the weaker and unprofessional employees of the IT department, the more they are dependent on suppliers and contractors, which often results in excessive spending on IT solutions, which with a professional approach could be implemented by much cheaper means and completely in other ways. The stronger the team at CIO, the less dependent on external organizations and structures. With an increase in the professionalism of the staff as a whole, the quality of work of all IT subsystems improves, downtime and problem situations decrease. In fact, the work of IT specialists is purely intellectual, which is not served by any banal motivation. Often, the performance of two different people in the same IT position may differ by tens. I believe that the IT director should create for his subordinates such conditions in which each of them will be able to maximize their potential in the workplace, which is a win-win strategy for both the employer and the employee. Every kind of encouragement in teaching new technologies and obtaining professional skills and knowledge in the IT industry is one of the main motivators for employees.
Analytics
The penultimate point that I would like to touch on in the article concerns the creation of certain indicators by which you can monitor and analyze the performance of people and software hardware . One of the powerful tools for analysis, and simply for direct work in the IT department is the incident management system. Besides the fact that it allows solving complex technological problems with the involvement of specialists from different directions, it also allows to give excellent analytics on the time needed to resolve the incident, to determine system downtime, causes and consequences of these downtimes. The work of such a system is beautifully painted up and down in the documentation of ITIL, and in one form or another is used in many large organizations. However, it is the analytics of the data of this system, together with the analytics of the monitoring system data, allow us to estimate the KPI work of employees, departments, technological subsystems, as well as to make forecasts and make adjustments to increase the productivity of the IT department.
At the edge of technology
If everything that was described before in the publication mostly refers to the operation and maintenance of the existing infrastructure at the proper level, then there is one direction of the IT director’s activity, which is connected with the development of infrastructure and the introduction of new technologies. No organization that wants to remain competitive in the market of its country, not to mention the global market, can not afford to miss the scientific and technological progress in the field of information technology. Here I would like to advise CIO to look for and try new technologies that give a noticeable advantage in work, allow to solve specific problems in work and give an increase in labor productivity in the whole organization . The question of the increase in labor productivity in the implementation of new IT systems, from my point of view, is one of the key when considering new solutions. Besides the fact that the IT director needs to see and consider in detail the new promising technology, the important thing is to choose the right manufacturer of this product or service who can provide decent quality at an affordable price. Very often there are solutions that are released raw for sale, and are extremely slowly being finalized afterwards. It is very important at the earliest stages to identify this and understand whether the organization is able to put up with it and whether it is not worthwhile to prefer some other solution. So for example, once you have found a suitable virtualization solution, you can safely use it throughout the organization in all projects, find a suitable database management system - you can not think about other DBMS for a long time, etc. The experience and knowledge gained in the implementation of new solutions should be scaled and applied as widely as possible throughout the organization.
Summarizing everything written in this article, we can say that the CIO to build reliable work of the IT department should focus on the following things:
- Constant study of new technologies and the development of skills to work with them to understand the emerging opportunities.
- Documentation of the entire IT infrastructure, mechanisms of its work, procedures for interaction between the machine and man.
- Organization of backup of all important data, as well as the creation and maintenance of the resiliency of the work of all relevant IT subsystems.
- Building and maintaining up to date IT infrastructure monitoring systems.
- Development of knowledge and skills of IT staff.
- Formation of a system that allows you to analyze the effectiveness of the work of specialists, equipment, software and the entire IT complex as a whole.
- Search, implement and use products and solutions that provide stability, reliability and acceptable technical characteristics of the work.
Focusing on these areas in their work, the CIO, within its authority, will give a powerful impetus to the development of the organization as a whole. We have reviewed aspects specific to the information technology industry. However, like any manager, the CIO will need to address issues with the financing of the department, the loyalty of senior management, without which it is impossible to implement any worthwhile and large-scale projects, search and retain employees, which is a headache for any manager. We in this article did not consciously touch upon these aspects, leaving them for specialized literature and courses.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/353906/
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