IT Management: Trends, Roles, and Organizational Structures
1. What is Administration?
Administration is the design process of creating and maintaining an environment where staff can work efficiently to achieve selected goals.
What is the Role of Management?
Management involves planning, organizing, integrating, directing, and controlling resources and personnel.
2. Importance of the IT Function
The IT function deals with new technologies, applications, hardware devices, and ways of processing information. It involves managing modern technology and understanding that information:
- Is stored and processed on computers (centralized).
- May be confidential at individual or institutional levels (centralized).
- Can be misused or disclosed (potential for destruction).
- May be subject to theft, sabotage, and fraud (potential for partial or total destruction).
The computer center can be the most valuable asset and, at the same time, the most vulnerable.
Risk
Risk is the proximity or possibility of harm or danger.
Security
Security is ensuring the fulfillment of something.
3. Importance of Managing the IT Function
Managing the IT function is the process of creating, designing, and maintaining an environment where individuals working in information technology, individually and in groups, can efficiently achieve selected goals. These individuals perform administrative functions like planning, organizing, integrating personnel, directing, and controlling.
4. Importance of Delegating Responsibilities
The information manager must delegate responsibilities related to the use of technology.
5. The IT Function and the Competitive Cycle
The computer revolution brought new information technologies and software for decision-making. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) cannot ignore this technological revolution. It’s crucial to analyze their operations and organizational processes to identify problems and design solutions that increase profitability using information and communication technologies.
6. Trends in Information Technologies
From the invention of the telephone to the fax took 80 years, from fax to the internet took 15 years, and since then, wireless and internet technologies have led to the concept of the web.
7. Considerations for the Future Technological Environment
The future involves adopting web-based business models using internet tools and standards, ensuring access to services and information anytime, anywhere. This is organized in a three-tier architecture: user interface, business logic, and traditional database management.
8. Transitioning to the New Environment
- Review the business model according to defined rules and constantly analyze information needs.
- Define a technology vision that aligns with organizational functions and processes, not just organizational structure.
- Consider people as part of any technology upgrade strategy, helping them build skills to understand, assimilate, and adopt new processing facilities.
- Identify opportunities for streamlining and reorganization supported by converging data, voice, and video technologies.
- Adopt remote backup services, data contingency plans, and other technology-enabled revitalization strategies.
9. Hardware, Software, and Data Communications Trends
Computer equipment has become cheaper, but software has become more expensive due to mergers between hardware and software companies. It’s difficult to find applications that precisely match specific needs, as companies often purchase software packages without fully understanding their utility.
10. Total Quality Management in IT
Total Quality Management (TQM) in IT focuses on administration and organization to provide quality customer service through employee involvement, customer focus, benchmarking, and continuous improvement.
Employee Involvement: Achieved by optimizing resources.
Customer Focus: Concentrates on customer needs and expectations.
Benchmarking: Identifies best practices in a process or activity and incorporates them into company operations.
Continuous Improvement: A constant search for perfection.
11. Reengineering IT Management
Reengineering is a response to shortcomings in functional organization and involves a structured approach: identifying key business processes, assigning responsibility for each process to an owner, defining process boundaries, and measuring process performance.
12. Organizational Structures
Organizations are groups of people pursuing common objectives rationally and consciously, subject to certain restrictions and based on specific resources. Structural design starts with the organization’s mission, which forms the basis for its objectives, strategies, plans, and activities.
13. Entrepreneurial Organizations
These organizations have simple structures, are typically young and small, operate in rapidly changing environments, are funded by investors, and are managed by a single director general. Information systems are often poorly developed.
14. New Responsibilities of the IT Manager
- Plan, manage, and monitor assigned technical and administrative staff.
- Organize functions, responsibilities, and activities, keeping documentation up-to-date, especially for technical staff.
- Manage the entry and development of new technologies and resources.
- Protect and enhance the organization’s structural capital by documenting existing and new technologies and resources.
- Manage, store, and preserve hardware, software, and physical space.
- Provide annual and periodic reports on departmental activities.
15. Bureaucratic Machine Organizations
These organizations operate like well-tuned machines, repeating specific processes. Examples include mass production factories, government organizations, airlines, and banks. Max Weber’s original objectives for this model were efficiency and functionality.
16. Divisionalized Bureaucracy
Coordination is achieved through production. Each division has considerable autonomy and operates independently. This structure is typical of large, mature organizations, especially corporations, but also increasingly found in public sectors and universities.
17. Professional Bureaucracy
A highly decentralized structure, both vertically and horizontally. Individuals work directly with clients, subject to the control of their professional peers. These peers provide training and reserve the right to censure improper practices.
18. Adhocracy
Adhocracy adapts processes to each specific situation. It’s characterized by low complexity, formality, and centralization.