Have you been handed the IT responsibilities for your organisation? Do you struggle communicate your business objectives to your IT provider?
Taking on the IT management duties is no easy task for non-technical people. Let's look a few key areas that you should focus on understanding first so you can better communicate your business objectives to your provider.
1. How to Best Manage Your IT Responsibilities
Problems can occur because people are unaware of the best practices for successfully managing outsourced IT relationships - and rightly so as often the person assigned responsibility around “IT” has no industry certification or qualification.
This leads to a scenario where you simply become a glorified traffic controller, passing off requests back and forth, rather than building an effective structure that can enable you to leverage your IT partner to their maximum potential, and minimise the organisations risk effectively.
There are four ways you can improve the way you manage your IT responsibilities:
- Understand and Implement IT Service Management
- Keep a Register of Issues for a Comprehensive Record of Incident and Problem Management
- Understand the Contracts and Service Level Agreements
- Request Major Incident Reports
Read more: Four ways to improve the way you management your IT responsibilities
2. How to Build An Effective Relationship With Your IT Partner
It’s important that both you and your IT provider invest in building a strong relationship. Why? Because strong relationships can create win-win situations that benefit both organisations.
Here are four ideas to help you build stronger relationships:
- Set and understand expectations
- Nominate a dedicated IT contact
- Understand IT partner’s motives
- Invest in face-to-face interactions
Read more: Learn how to built better relationships with your IT partner
3. IT Service Management
IT service management, or ITSM, was formerly known as ITIL - a universal standard and best practice for IT service delivery. Most medium to large internal IT departments and most mature IT providers use this model for service delivery.
ITSM gives the IT provider (internal or external) the ability to implement reliability within their delivery framework so they can deliver that higher level of service.
Let’s look at four important principles of ITSM:
- Incident management
- Problem management
- Change management
- Knowledge management
Read more: The principles of ITSM: learn what they are and why they're important
4. Industry Benchmarks
Here are some industry benchmarks so you can compare how your provider is performing compared to other organisations.
This review will break down the industry benchmarks across four categories:
- IT spend
- Client satisfaction
- Service deliverability
- Managed services cost
Read more: Industry benchmarks: how does your IT provider compare?