If I Were in IT Management Today…

I’ve had a couple of blog posts talking about how there is a disconnect between “the market” and “the majority of customers” where things like cloud (and less so storage) are concerned. So I thought I’d try this out as a follow on. If I were running your average medium to large IT shop (not talking extremely huge, just medium to large), what would I be focused on right now.

By way of introduction, for those who don’t know, I’m relatively conservative in my use of IT, I’ve been around the block, been burned a few times (OS/2 Beta Tester, WFW, WP… The list goes on), and the organizations I’ve worked for where I was part of “Enterprise IT” were all relatively conservative (Utilities, Financials), while the organizations i worked in Product or App Development for were all relatively cutting edge. I’ve got a background in architecture, App Dev, and large systems projects, and think that IT Management is (sadly) 50% corporate politics and 50% actually managing IT. I’ll focus on problems that we all have in general here, rather than a certain vertical, and most of these problems are applicable to all but the largest and smallest IT shops today.

By way of understanding, this list is the stuff I would be spending research or education time on, and is kept limited because the bulk of you and your staff’s time is of course spent achieving or fixing for the company, not researching. Though most IT shops I know of have room for the amount of research I’m talking about below.