IT Management

The physiological layer: IT Infrastructure & Operations

Infrastruction and Operations must be maintained in order to make the applications run congestion free and to maintain servers effectively and efficiently without affecting the performance of the applications. Care must be taken to provide the end users not to wait hours & days for solving their IT incidents.

The safety layer: Information Security

Once the Infrastructure has been deployed and is working smoothly, the business requires its critical information to be secured. If the IT or the Information Security procedures cannot provide the level of security required to manage the information electronically there might be a chance of security breach and may result in total disaster.

The social layer: Communications

In the business today, the response time of your Internet server or the easiness to contact with your technical support, can make consumers "loving" your products (and so "belonging" you as customers) or not.
And this layer does not cover only the customer front end but also the back office of your systems (Enterprise Resources Planning, for instance)and the way you open them to your providers through the use of standard protocols to exchange data.
If they can get your demand forecast automatically back in their own systems you will build a solid network of business partners willing to work with your company.

Esteem layer: Applications

The way an Enterprise manage this level of its Information System reveals the culture of the company:

•  an individualistic (or departmental) behaviour will probably led to silos of information without difficulties to share it.
•  on the other side, consideration and esteem for the rest of the company, will be reflected more and more in integrated information systems where information is available on an easy way to those who require it.

Integration means that your job depends on information that others have to provide to the system. A lot of integrated information systems implementation fail at this point as inter-dependency of the different Departments from each other has not been clearly explained and reviewed.
What is not in the system does not exist: be sure that all the users of your integrated system know this maxim. And explain them that not sharing information is a lack of respect of others and sometimes a criminal act (criminal in the sense that making the enterprise less competitive leads to cutting jobs at the end, and jobs means lives).

Top level: Business Process Management System

Do you know this kind of organization where the procedures are defined on one side (normally by Quality department). On other side, Information Systems are implemented on an integrated way with the state of the art technology. But when a process audit is performed, you discover three disconnected worlds:

•  the official procedures
•  the information system
•  the real working life

To make this efficient, current technology offers two ways:

•  cabling business rules in the existing integrated systems: ERP, CRM...
•  putting a user front end layer on top of the existing systems, to perform this integration: the Business Process Management Suite

Business Process Management is the point where the Information Technology Management transcends his technological nature and meet the Business needs and the Psychology of the organization.