What if your company’s biggest decisions were being made by the wrong people?
Every day, your IT department must make important decisions that affect your entire organization. Without the right guidance, some of these decisions may cost your company quite a bit of time and money.
Care to improve your IT department today? Keep reading to discover the IT decisions that your IT staff shouldn’t be making.
1. Budgetary Matters
It’s an open secret that IT decisions can become very expensive. The problem compounds when overextends beyond the existing boundaries and target metrics.
If you’re not careful, you might end up spending money hand over fist to accomplish very vague objectives. Even if staff successfully accomplish those objectives, the benefit to your company might be minimal.
These decisions are best made by someone in a position to see the big picture for your company. That ensures that money spent on software, hardware, and services will strengthen the entire company instead of just one department.
What’s the solution, then? Executives need to firmly define the role IT plays in the organization and define IT’s spending metrics. This keeps the department as a smoothly-running machine while ensuring that no time and no budget is wasted.
2. Organizational IT Capabilities
Here’s an open secret about IT capabilities: every employee eventually discovers there is such a thing as “too much.”
It’s trivially easy for your IT to make many capabilities available to the entire organization. However, the last thing you want to do is leave IT in charge of figuring out which capabilities should extend to your entire company.
One reason for this is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Some employees may cause some serious damage when using capabilities they don’t fully understand. Even if they don’t cause damage, untrained employees trying out all the new “bells and whistles” can cut into your productivity.
Another reason is that IT decisions about this matter usually go one of two ways: they are either too strict or too flexible.
For example, if IT determines what should be standard and what shouldn’t be, they might potentially limit the creativity and flexibility of different departments. They also might standardize too little, which can increase delays, increase your costs, and ultimately decrease opportunities for synergy between divisions.
Once more, the solution is simple: executives should offer a clear vision of what capabilities different divisions should have access to. When IT carries out that vision, you are left with a more unified and organized company.
3. IT Initiative Funding
Earlier, we discussed why you should be very careful about which staff members are making budgetary decisions. While that extends to the “big picture” matters, it also extends to individual IT initiatives.
Left to their own devices, your IT department may come up with the most creative ideas in the world. This is especially true when users come to IT with problems and your IT department develops some creative solutions.
Any business that tries to greenlight every initiative and every great idea would be bankrupt within a month. Executives must work in tandem with IT so they don’t burn themselves out or focus too much on extraneous initiatives.
At the end of the day, it’s vital to focus on generating profit for the company. Towards that end, it is important for IT to support higher-paying initiatives in favor of those that offer less tangible rewards.
4. Security and Privacy Risks
One sobering fact about running a business is that nothing is ever completely secure. When it comes to your network security and privacy, it’s impossible to be 100% secure.
Why is that, though? Simple: the more you enhance security and privacy measures, the users will have a harder time accessing important info and completing their tasks. Therefore, you must find the delicate tradeoff between security, privacy, and accessibility.
It’s important that executives work closely with IT on this matter. Otherwise, departments without sufficient guidance might end up going over budget when it comes to security and privacy, all while grinding employee productivity to a halt. Also, they may not focus enough on security and privacy and leave the organization vulnerable.
5. Acceptable IT Quality
What are the three words you never want to hear from an employee? “That’s good enough.”
It’s important for every department to strive for the highest possible quality. But with IT, the chief difficulty is that the quality of their services is usually reflected in the various services your organization has invested in.
Once again, it all circles back to the budget. Only an experienced executive should decide what the “sweet spot” is between cost and benefits when it comes to IT services. By taking a more direct hand in this process, you can keep from investing too much in services that aren’t worth it.
Too much investment in these services can lead to downtime, access issues, and other major problems for users.
6. Casting blame
At the executive level, the best leaders like to remind their staff that “the buck stops here.” However, this isn’t always the case with the IT department.
Because these departments are so large, it can be difficult to determine who is in charge of each initiative. Even worse, it can be difficult for workers to determine who is leading the different projects they are working on.
Your best bet is to assign your own executives to each major IT project. Such an executive can help to control costs, manage personnel, and determine the effectiveness of different initiatives.
The Right IT Decisions: Your Next Move
Now you know which IT decisions your IT staff shouldn’t be making. However, do you know who can provide the staffing solutions your business needs?
We specialize in staffing and recruitment for IT and tech talent in the Austin, Texas area. To see what we can do for your business, contact us today!
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