- Ten Commandments for Building a "World-Class" Infrastructure
- Thou shalt measure customer satisfaction.
- Thou shalt structure and mentor thy organization to focus on Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS).
- Senior IT management must focus at least 50% of their time, resource, and budget on organization, people, and process initiatives.
- Honor thy mainframe disciplines, and keep them holy—but keep out the bureaucracy!
- Keep all production systems equal in the eyes of the IT staff.
- Thou shalt maintain centralized control for infrastructure standards and processes.
- Thou shalt design the infrastructure as an internal XSP.
- Thou shalt build an attractive, cost-effective, and flexible IT infrastructure and thy customers will come.
- Measure all; verily, you cannot manage what you do not measure.
- Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute
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VI. Keep all production systems equal in the eyes of the IT staff.
From a hardware perspective, today's enterprise consists of mainframes, PC's, Macintoshes, workstations, servers, etc. You might be tempted to create separate support groups for each—wrong! Now don't misunderstand; you still need experts supporting different technologies, but providing an environment that promotes equal opportunity (the ability to easily cross-train) is crucial.
Don't build silos surrounding technologies. Your support team should be referred to as technical services (no more and no less), and all its staff members should be cross-trained on as many platforms as each can handle.
Separating support along technologies can result in inefficiencies, duplication of efforts (such as systems-management tools), political issues, poor communication, and awful morale. Today, when everyone is doing more with less, you need to get the most out of your staff.