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IT Management Slideshow:
Six Decisions IT Employees Should Never Make

By Dennis McCafferty on 2011-02-25


How much empowerment is too much for your IT employees? As reluctant as you may be to micromanage your teams, there are certain decisions that you simply can't leave to the troops. For Harvard Business Review, authors Jeanne W. Ross and Peter Weill have come up with the six IT decisions that your tech employees should never make. These six decisions will serve as part of a book, "Harvard Business Review on Aligning Technology with Strategy," due in April 2011. The book launches a series of 17 paperbacks all themed with the “Harvard Business Review on ...” tagline. Weill is a senior research scientist and chair of the Center for Information Systems Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Ross is a principal research scientist with the Sloan School. Here's a preview of their work:

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Decision 1

How much to spend.IT employees tend to want to spend more than is necessary, even when it conflicts with business goals.

Advice:

Avoid overspending by defining concrete outcomes of tech purchases.Telling your team to simply “get a solution that will provide more information” can waste thousands of dollars spent chasing elusive benefits.

Decision 2

Defining the business processes that receive IT dollars.It's up to the CIO to decide which IT initiatives will advance business strategies.

Advice:

The downside of allowing your IT staff to define business processes? They'll get buried in the pursuit of irrelevant projects.

Decision 3

Whether to integrate an IT capability organization-wide.Centralizing IT capability can save money—but might diminish flexibility.

Advice:

It's up to the CIO to strike the balance between optimal flexibility and flexibility that becomes costly and dilutes departmental synergy.

Decision 4

How good do our IT services need to be?Your IT team will naturally seek a Cadillac when, sometimes, a Buick will do.

Advice:

It's up to you to effectively measure which bells and whistles are really needed. Determine how much reliability, responsiveness and data accessibility you need (not want) to have.

Decision 5

How much security and/or privacy risk is tolerable.Overemphasis on security can impact customer, supplier relationships and productivity.

Advice:

It's up to you to have a good handle on how much inconvenience other departments can tolerate in the name of security.

Decision 6

Who gets blamed for IT failures.You're the boss. You are responsible for assigning clearly defined roles and expectations.

Advice:

Establishing metrics for IT performance removes temptation of a blame game within your IT department and allows for objective post-failure evaluation.

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