PCAuthority just carried a great feature “Top 10 issues overloading IT managers,” that everyone should read. Nearly all of us who work with these demon machines depend on the IT folks. There are a lot of things we can do to make their lives easier (or at least not make their lives more hellish.)
The ten issues are:
10. Cloud integration (is waaaay complicated and must be done right. Integrating with local resources is both a technical and management issue.)
9. Internal/external data breaches (Think new technology, new hacks, external bad actors and internal bad actors. Oh yea, and consider the clueless twits who click on malicious attachments in spam.)
8. OS migration (W-I-N-D-O-W-S-7. This is really ugly if the enterprise opted out of Vista. Migration from WinXP to Win7 is serious work.)
7. Patch deployment (A big job that is made bigger by more users plus more work stations plus more software plus virtualized machines times more malware that is more dangerous.)
6. Remote workers (Those using their own machines are a real pain.)
5. Compliance (Regulatory acts like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA as well as local and federal laws mean that most companies are holding onto more data.)
4. Over management by non-IT staff (They just don’t understand, especially the sales folks who promise customers the impossible.)
3. Virtualization (This offers great benefits and great complexity)
2. Storage (Adding drives isn’t the answer.)
1. Budget constraints (recession = do more with less.)
The writers also give honorable mention to:
— Web management (Regulating on-the-job gaming, porn browsing, Facebook, Twitter and such should be a management responsibility.)
— Integration of Web 2.0 tools (Blogs, wikis and social networks are useful internal tools, but they are work for IT)
As I write this, our IT staff is struggling to replace a major email server. Of course it started acting up late Saturday night.
Tom Kelchner