IT management is anything but an easy task, and CIOs believe that there’s an ongoing talent crisis and in the field. In a world of extreme dynamism, fierce competition and reliable change, the ability to reinvent yourself through IT has become essential, bringing higher efficiency, reduced costs and increased productivity.
The problem is that modern business practices have generated an almost unbearable pressure on IT managers and, even with all the new methodologies that are born every day, creating a setting that is favorable for innovation is not so simple. With this in mind, here are four tips that will surely help you manage your IT department.
Ditch Bureaucracy
A company with too many hierarchical levels and organizational structure becomes heavy and slow. It’s then necessary to open the company, so that things flow more easily. For example, the CIO should delegate tasks as much as possible, thus providing autonomy to other people and creating a dynamic based on trust, empowerment and speed in decision making.
Eliminating bureaucracy in IT management, and the consequent greater freedom to the team, facilitates the emergence of new solutions. Still, it is important to remember that such an environment is intrinsically linked to the need to have a tolerance to mistakes, which is why it is important to work with an agile methodology.
Gamify
Using techniques from game engagement to encourage increased productivity in an IT team may sound strange, but the truth is that it can innovate creative way to increase productivity and generate more business value.
Gamification is about receiving rewards in exchange for actions, so a better individual performance can result in the establishment of a ranking within a team, to create an healthy competitive nature which can then be rewarded, according to the results.
Outsource
A better IT management also has to do with outsourcing some areas, such as Service Desk and Data Center, which allows teams to devote more time and focus to the tasks more closely linked to business. While outsourcing is sometimes a touchy subject, because people almost immediately think about job cuts and foreign call centers, it all comes down to choosing the best option.
There are several companies devoted to providing IT support services, and Support Stack is a very popular example. They take care of several things, such as support, hosting, cloud services, backups, and others, so that teams can focus on their really important tasks and businesses do not have to spend too much money on IT expansion.
Innovate
In a recent survey by Deloitte, 31% of the surveyed IT professionals stated that, in their companies, innovation happens by accident, and only 14% said their companies have clear policies to stimulate it. These results are a clear sign of the current state of affairs, which why a change in mentality is much needed.
To innovate in IT management, staff needs to be trained to look at the daily demands from a new perspective, more free and autonomous. This will lead to alternative insights, with no initial judgments and from a questioning position. Freedom is needed, so that professionals can foster a kind of permanent brainstorm in decision-making. If problems are new, solutions should be as well.
