Outsourcing IT, It’s Not Easy

In a previous article I wrote about outsourcing software development, in this one I’ll cover some aspects of outsourcing your IT.  

What do you do if you’re not big enough to employ IT staff? If your IT needs are simple and you’re lucky you have a tech-savvy worker who will do the odd IT tasks alongside his real work, but for many small and medium sized businesses the answer is to engage an external company to supply, configure and maintain your IT - in other words you outsource it. Larger companies commonly also outsource IT, usually in the belief that an external IT company will have more diverse and expert specialists who will be able to deliver IT cheaper than an in-house IT person or team, and sometimes to take advantage of lower labour rates abroad.

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Are You On Their Payroll?

If I asked you to name a software supplier used by six hundred employers on the island you’d probably reply “Microsoft”. If I asked you for another you would probably struggle. Oracle? Their software is largely used by much bigger companies than those on the IoM. Canonical? Probably not. Sage? Hmmm, maybe. DPN? Who?

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e-Commerce 4 U ?

The Isle of Man economy is in the back of the Postman’s van. Yes, seriously, we are shopping more and more online for books, clothes, gadgets, toys, even frozen foods, the catalogue of retail goods arriving on the island from the UK by post or courier is constantly growing.

And with it sections of our own retail economy are going down the pan. Why? And what can we do about it?

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So What’s IT For?

In the last article I suggested that a big part of the IT Manager’s job is to ensure people are able to work with their IT. Now I want to cover how that IT should help them in their jobs.

There are, in my mind, three big benefits from corporate IT: Information Exploitation, Communication & Collaboration, and Stakeholder Enablement. If bits of IT deliver these benefits then the IT is creating value, if not then we might as well scrap it. So what do I mean by these three concepts?

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Pay Attention To The Wetware

The biggest influence on IT success is people; not the people in the IT department, but the users, a.k.a “victims”, of our IT. The single most important measure of whether the IT we deliver is successful is how well people use it. Network speed and stability, server uptime, security etc. pale into insignificance when considered against how well and productively our people are working in their jobs.

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Mama, there's a thing on the Internet

The “Internet of Things” (IoT) has become a fashionable IT buzzphrase over the past three years, although the idea has been around for much longer, so what’s it all about?

Like most IT hype the reality is pretty mundane, the IoT is the concept of the Internet being used by “not people or computers”. Examples include vending machines which alert the operator when they need restocking, smart meters which report the use of electricity in real-time and enable supply management and demand-based pricing, real-time vehicle trackers, air quality meters, building security systems, health monitoring devices and smartphones.

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Open Source

Have you considered using “Open Source” software as part of your organisation’s IT systems? Chances are that if you’re an executive the answer is No. I meet many executives, both business and IT leaders, who dismiss the use of Open Source without much consideration for a variety of reasons. Common amongst these reasons are: they don’t trust the product because it is “free” and you get what you pay for, no company is accountable for warranting that the product is fit for purpose or free of bugs or malware, nobody is identifiably responsible for providing support if the product goes wrong, and there is nobody to enter into a contract with who can be sued to mitigate the risk of losses consequent to product failure.

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IT's A Matter Of Trust

The Isle of Man Government has launched an online survey to inform its Digital Strategy - basically a survey about what we think of Government’s current online services, what other services they might provide online, and how they handle the data we provide through online services. Ours is not the the only Government hoping to increase their provision of services through digital channels, many others are treading the same path including our neighbour to the East which has a “Digital By Default” programme both to make services available to the public via the web, and to make the web the preferred means of accessing those services.

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Communication Skills & Windows 10

To many of us, particularly in business or politics, communication skills are very important; we specify the need for them in job adverts, we evaluate them at interview, we go on courses to improve them. In general we mean face to face communication but not always. To me, sitting comfortably at home bashing out another article aspiring to make you think a little more about technology, some mastery of the written word is important, and similarly we often care about the tone of the letters we write to customers.

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Cyber Security Begins In The Boardroom

The festive season is behind us, and many network security professionals will be breathing a sigh of relief. The reality is that the major holidays, particularly Christmas and Easter, are prime time for hacking - who can guess whether this is because the script kiddies are out of school and have more time, or because professional hackers know that corporate IT teams will be undermanned and more relaxed, it is nevertheless a known phenomenon. As a CIO I have witnessed it myself, big serious network hacking attempts are more common at the weekend and most especially the holidays when system administrators are less likely to be working and spot unusual behaviour.

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