Even though the worst practices in IT management would be a much more fun blog topic, we’re going to bless your day with our three favorite IT management best practices that every business, including yours, should know.
They’re called best practices for a reason; they’re the best because they help you raise your IT game from “Our IT team supports our business well,” to “My eyes! My eyes! Our IT team is blinding me with its dazzling awesomeness!”
Who doesn’t want that?
If you follow these three IT management best practices, you’ll supercharge your ability to do things like:
- Streamline IT so that you’re doing only the stuff you need to do… saving time, money, and headspace in the process.
- Secure your organization from all the nasties.
- Demonstrate how much IT contributes to business improvement.
- Work well with outside people, e.g., compliance auditors.
Wait, IT Management Is Kind of a Big Subject, Yes?
You got it. IT management is how you go about dealing with every aspect of IT and how it relates to every aspect of your business. You’re looking at:
- How you manage IT infrastructure and assets.
- How IT serves your colleagues and customers.
- How IT protects your business and its customers.
- How your business IT should evolve in the future.
- The principles and frameworks on which you hang your IT decisions.
Learning the go-to best practices to manage all your IT will help you corral, control, and optimize your IT ecosystem as well as maintain a degree of much-needed sanity.
Best Practice 1: Get Some IT Governance
IT governance is the Peter Parker side of Spiderman: a sparkly, all-powerful business improvement tool dressed up as boring words. IT governance is high-level stuff. It’s where IT sits in the boardroom with all the other suits and nods when the CEO nods.
IT governance sets the direction for the investment and oomph that your business puts into IT. It joins the dots between business goals and what your organization’s IT is actually for. It articulates how IT could and should support your business. IT governance practices include:
- Aligning IT with business goals.
- Reviewing your current IT ecosystem and deciding whether it’s fit for your purpose. If not, figure out what needs to change.
- Deciding on IT procurement protocols.
- Having high-level discussions with business colleagues to discover areas where IT could improve things for them, e.g., through onboarding automation for HR.
- Deciding the procedures, principles, and measures of risk mitigation.
- Scanning the horizon for IT that will help your business stay competitive and to watch for security-risks-as-yet-unborn.
- Monitoring performance and assigning roles and responsibilities.
Best Practice 2: Have a Strategy
Strategies make everything better. That’s because they are a pre-determined framework from which you can make operational decisions. An IT strategy:
Aligns With IT Governance
Your IT strategy is IT governance in action. It carries out the business support that your IT governance has mapped out, including supporting business goals. If your business is planning expansion, has particular growth targets, is moving into new markets, is trying to win contracts with some chunky organizations, or is just trying to survive the next year, your IT operations should support it. Having an IT strategy means you understand where the business is going and can align your IT tasks with what your business needs to do.
Prevents Wasted Time and Money
Hey, all the cool kids are playing with that new AI thing. Should you spend a few thousand on it? Let’s consult the strategy. If it doesn’t say to get that new AI thing because it’ll help you do stuff, then pass. An IT strategy means you won’t waste time and resources on things that aren’t relevant to your business.
Is Measurable
How do you know if IT is working? If your sales team bundles your IT manager into a dumpster, or there are 1,3200,000 calls to the helpdesk daily, you know something is wrong. But it’s much easier to make sure IT is working if, during your IT governance research, you’ve cooked up some performance standards with a side order of shiny bright metrics. Handy measures and metrics might look like:
- Number of incidents or network outages.
- Service availability.
- Data breaches deflected.
- User satisfaction.
- Cost of IT per user.
- Passing compliance audits.
- Mean time to resolve an issue.
- Service level agreement metrics.
Best Practice 3: Reduce Risk
It’s important to be proactive in managing the risk of cyber attacks or data breaches, and that’s why reducing that risk is our favorite IT management best practice. The world is an evil maelstrom of spammers and malware merchants who are out to get you because it’s profitable and they were never loved as children. Don’t shed a tear for them. Instead, arm yourself with a bristling array of cybersecurity defenses, beautifully organized within the framework of an IT security strategy. You might include such mouth-watering beauties as:
- Working towards a compliance framework such as SOC 2, FINRA, or HIPAA.
- Going full MDM and Cloud SSO to enjoy the fruits of encryption, enforced passcodes and updates, secure onboarding and offboarding, controlled access, multifactor authentication, and an IT asset register that’ll make your eyes water.
- Firing off some rounds of phishing simulation at your colleagues to train them up into not being so dumb at security.
- Installing antivirus software, DNS filtering, and web filtering.
- Appointing an external auditor to find the gaps in your cybersecurity defenses and then hiring some amazing and beautiful IT people (i.e., us) to close those gaps for you.
There Are More Than Three IT Management Best Practices!
These are just three of the IT management best practices that every business should know. We could also throw in two more:
- Automate everything. Automation saves time and reduces human error.
- Know your customer. Step out of the basement and find out how IT can make your colleagues’ and customers’ lives easier. Be proactive in demonstrating IT as a value-center rather than a cost-center.
Chances are that you’re already well-versed in IT management best practices. But if you’d like to make sure, give us a call. We’re here for a friendly chat anytime.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. We love chatting all things IT support and cybersecurity – call us now.