Without well-defined Core Processes and Practices, IT staff are in a state of constant improvisation, causing delays, defects and unneeded inconsistencies. IT's processes and practices divide into five categories:
 | Having well-defined processes and
practices is vital. IT Catalysts understands that the CIO's job isn't to institute well-defined processes and practices, at least, not directly. This isn't something the CIO can do. Good processes aren't what lead to successful IT. Processes and practices are enablers - they help people succeed. Success will never be the result of the processes themselves. So what CIOs can and should do is to foster a strong process culture, and make sure IT managers understand the difference between managing processes and managing the work. With these factors in place, the organization will make process happen naturally instead of it being forced onto IT professionals who just don't see the point. |
Effective delivery management ensures work is completed in a disciplined, organized fashion. It includes:
- Release management
- Project management
- Coordination of multi-project initiatives
- Oversight for multi-initiative strategic programs
The result: An IT organization that is excellent at turning strategic intent into reliable results.
Application support includes:
- Package selection and integration
- Application maintenance and enhancements
- New application development
IT Catalysts can help you sort through these mismatches to implement methodologies that fit the work your organization actually does, and that deliver the results the enterprise needs.
| Architecture management
has gained a reputation for creating academic ivory-tower white-paper
factories. It doesn't have to turn out that way. IT Catalysts can show
you how to institute a results-focused architecture management practice
- one that helps your IT organization groom all three layers of its
technology portfolio - applications, information, and platforms - so
that every application support effort is as efficient as possible. We can help you develop an architecture management practice that remains pragmatic and practical ... one that:
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IT Operations and systems management are the disciplines that keep the business running every day. It's a tough job made tougher by the gap between the typical service level measures used to assess this set of responsibilities and the only metric that really matters: Operations and systems management achieves perfection when it is perfectly invisible.
IT Catalysts can help IT operations become entirely unnoticed by improving its capabilities in these core process domains:
- Demand management (capacity, availability and performance management)
- System and network administration
- Change control
- Incident and problem management
- Vulnerability management; continuity and recovery planning
- Production cycle
Many in the industry ignore the significance of personal technologies, considering desktop computers to be just another device, smartphones to be just another pain in the neck, and the enterprise telephone system to be (1) just plain boring, and (2) with luck someone else's problem.
In fact, personal technologies just might be as important to the enterprise as its ERP systems. Why? It's the personal technologies that allow workgroups and individual end-users to address the small-scale needs that IT lacks the resources to address. And while these small-scale needs might each have only minor significance, in the aggregate they can have a huge impact on a company's overall performance.
Personal technologies include these three areas of responsibility:
- Planning and deployment
- End-user training and support
- Service desk processes