Chapter 8 - IT Ops & Outsourcing Flashcards
How do you ensure effective IT ops?
- consistently apply best practices
- involve all stakeholders in IT ops
- adopt partnerships perspective
What are the differences between internal and external measures?
External measures are what the customers see such as turnaround times, program failures, response time
Internal measures is what the org sees - availability of resources, job queue length, number of errors etc…
External measures can usually be correllated to internal measures
What are some takeaway budget trends?
- salaries and benefits, new hw/sw and supporting IT services are evenly split
- 25-80% dedicated to new services
- growing 7% in 2008
What are the three common operations problems?
1) Slow response times
2) Down networks
3) Data unavailability and integrity compromised
What are the three strategies to improve operations?
1) Buy more equipment
2) Regulate and prioritize computer resources and activities
3) Implement operations measaurements, standards and benchmarks
What is the key to managing operations?
- Set standards and goals
- Manage accordingly - monitor performance, respond to problems
Need to hire a good manager and set a culture that values good operations
What’s new in managing operations?
- Managing open source
- security
- large DW
- striking balance between data dissemination and privacy
- talent shortage
What are ways you can deal with Talent Shortage
- recruit in-house
- redefine job of IT professional
- use interim professionals or contractors
- keep talent!
- simplify and centralize IT ops to reduce demand
What are the driving forces towards outsourcing?
- Added value in products and services for the customers
- Focus on core competencies of the business for sake of value prop
IT service firms are expected to be what now?
Strategic partners
So it is now important they have a win-win relationships with customers
What is monolithic outsourcing?
Outsourcing huge IT projects that involve most of the IT operations
What is a more popular type of outsourcing in the 1980s?
Choosing to only outsource the maintenance of legacy systems or development of new client-server systems
- Retrofitting for Y2K compliance
What are the 4 changes that occur as outsourcing becomes more prevelant?
1) IS management loses control
2) Providers take more risks
3) Providers margins improve
4) Choosing a provider becomes more important
What are the types of outsourcing models?
6:
- monolithic
- transitional
- best-of-breed
- shared services
- businesss process outsourcing
- e-bus outsources
What is best of breed outsourcing?
Picking a vendor based on specialty when you cant do it
- coordination is a challenge
