In today’s business environment, IT management responsibilities often fall on the CFO, business owner or other senior leader when there’s no internal IT department.
These individuals are tasked with running fail-proof IT departments – a challenging feat considering many have little to no IT management experience and often have limited internal IT resources to work with.
There’s a lot at stake when it comes to IT management, especially around cybersecurity, IT support, IT purchasing and strategic planning. After all, your IT operation is the backbone of your business.
Regardless of your IT expertise, here are five critical considerations to help drive IT decision making:
- Security: IT security isn’t something you can simply set and forget, and it’s not something you can afford to chance. Effective IT security requires constant monitoring to ensure you’re staying ahead of emerging security threats.
- Compliance: Compliance isn’t a one-off, check-box obligation. Policies and regulations are always changing, so it’s important to vigilantly monitor regulatory changes to stay current and to ensure that you have the right risk management solutions in place.
- Performance: If you can measure it, you can manage it. A predefined set of metrics will help you monitor and measure the performance of IT resources. Knowing what’s working and what needs to be updated will allow you to define IT priorities and better allocate appropriate resources.
- Adoption of policies and standards: Setting policies and standards is key, but knowing how to enforce company-wide adoption is equally important. Start with buy-in from senior leadership and make sure to invest the necessary amount of time and effort to define and implement policies.
- Budget: The first step in creating an IT budget is clearly defining your three to five year IT strategic plan. Your budget will be driven by your short and long term business goals, so it’s important that they’re aligned.
Founder and CEO of Coretelligent, a nationwide IT support and private cloud service provider.
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- 5 Critical Considerations for Effective IT Decision Making - June 20, 2016
