We can find on the Register site a Microsoft-sponsored report by Freeform Dynamics on the daily frustrations of IT management work. The results are introduced as “surprising and interesting” but I don’t see where the surprise comes from. The main take-away is that the tools and systems that support IT management are fragmented and that better integration is needed. This is very true but hardly qualifies as a surprise unless you’ve been living in a PowerPoint world (where the boxes are always nicely layered and connected – after all there even are built-in functions in PowerPoint to polish this lie by ensuring that objects look well distributed and aligned). But the report is still an interesting short read.
Hi William,
The report is designed to highlight practical realities of day to day IT management, and provide the person tasked with working out ‘what to do’ from a business-IT alignment perspective as IT starts thinking about encapsulating what it does for the business in terms of services.
The need to put it all into language that groups higher up the organisation (and removed from the daily reality of running an IT shop) will understand is quite important.
The surprise is two fold – the first is that some seemingly innocuous steps(such as user and IT staff training) can have significant impact in reducing burden on the IT department (suprise as in it seems so obvious yet we found big differences between organisations doing it versus not doing it), and the second is that ‘big suites’ sold as ‘integrated management suites’ aren’t in fact so integrated after all. Ok, to the hardened IT pro, maybe the last one is no suprise at all. Perhaps by making this observation we may in some way provide guidance where there was none before, at least from the vendors, anyway
Thanks for reading the report, and the opportunity to comment back.
Best, Martin.