1: Defining IT services
The first point is a question of order. It is necessary that the IT department is not a place where the survival of the fittest prevails and that anyone with power within the company can do what they want when they want. The IT department must define its services and how they are offered. It should also define the deliverables, the time it will take to develop each, and to what specifications they are developed. These services should support, as far as possible, the services offered by the company.
Some of the benefits of defining services are: to be able to put a cost to each of the services; to be able to quantify how many services are requested, per week, month and year as appropriate measurement intervals; to have greater control over deliveries, allowing to standardize to a large extent what is being delivered and the time in which it is being delivered, allowing the company to be clear about how it should count on the IT department and how reliable its deliverables are.
2: Single touchpoint
In addition to defining the services offered, it is necessary to define and respect the order in which they are requested. Without this order, any person at any time can request something without any formality, generating, in the event of any inconvenience, difficulties in recapping the event and the impossibility of documenting the “lessons learned.” For this reason, it is necessary to implement a point of entry and contact with the IT department.
The purpose of this single touchpoint is that every user of the IT department can request, in a single place, the services offered and that everything requested is documented correctly. In addition, this will ensure that the user is educated on what he can and how to ask for it, allowing the prioritization of each request.
The goal is for this single touchpoint to be a website where a catalog of requests is shown, and the user chooses what they need. The user will know from the beginning how and when they will receive an answer, and through this same media, they can have fluid and precise communication about the status of their request, allowing the company to plan.
The two points mentioned above are the basis and the beginning of a functional and productive IT department. With these premises, it will be possible to have a clear idea of how the IT department will be presented to the company and how it will budget the cost and growth capacity based on the service demand. Without this initial order, any other initiative will have a tortuous path to implementation and, sooner or later, will be considered one more expense in the IT black hole.
Writed by Luis Pulido
CEO
BPS