Best Practice IT Standards
Where there are no standards there is only chaos.
High-Performance IT Health Checks proposes a set of Best Practice IT Standards for IT teams to follow. IT teams tend to use a variety of disjointed technical standards or none whatsoever. This situation leads to IT departments with:
1. A complete lack of professional or industry standards.
2. Multiple standards in use.
3. An absence of good process.
4. Multiple sources of technical truth.
5. Scripts as a quick fix panacea.
6. Production support band aide solutions.
7. A high number of manual fix activities.
8. A lack of automation.
9. Poor systems implementations.
In some of the IT departments and teams that I managed, I noticed there were standards in use that produced significant benefits. These standards became the Best Practice IT Standards – use of these can be directly linked to:
1. Cost savings.
2. Better software implementations (Due to staff training being up to date.)
3. Fewer service delivery failures and need for rework.
4. IT intranet as a single source of truth.
5. Automation of recurrent manual activities.
6. Better hardware risk mitigation.
7. Removal of redundant hardware, systems software, utilities, and tools.
8. Higher-quality projects.
9. Technical excellence.
10. Consistent 99.9% systems availability.
11. Higher staff morale and job satisfaction levels.
When the High-Performance IT process is rolled out, each IT team uses a Current/Target Position template to assess these two positions. The target position is based on the Best Practice IT Standards plus the teams’ own functional objectives.
