Taking the reins

Set standards

John Eary

NCC

It is a critical part of any IT policy that all new hardware is standardised by the IT department before going in to live service. Without such checks no guarantee can be made that the correct security patches and anti-virus software have been installed. A simple solution would be to allocate IP addresses manually (or better still only allow access to known Ethernet addresses) so that new machines cannot join the corporate network until they have passed through the IT department. This may be a symptom of the IT department being perceived as slow and inefficient in ordering and configuring machines.

It would be good practice to offer an internal service level agreement guaranteeing, say, a time of 24 hours from the machine arriving to being fully operational on someone's desk. It would also be worth professionalising and publishing your supplier terms, ensuring they offer short lead times (48 hours maximum) on new PCs as this will increase the willingness of staff to order PCs through IT in the first place.

Senior management need to commit

Andrew Davies

Visiting professor in information systems, Cranfield School of Management

It sounds as if you have a real big technology infrastructure management problem. Your business customers will soon find out that effective "e" systems can only be delivered in an organisation that has established, and enforces, rigid standards for the configuration and use of PCs. Someone must have the responsibility for doing this and, in most organisations, the obvious choice is the IT function.

It may sound corny, but I suspect that you need an IT strategy, to which your senior business management have committed. At Cranfield, we have worked with many organisations to help them develop their IT strategy, aligning this with the business strategy and an IS application development strategy. It is not easy but we have found it the most effective way to get the business leaders to understand how best to use IT to enable the delivery of benefit to the business.

IT should drive the process

Paul Williams

Arthur Andersen Consulting

This is where it is crucial for senior management to implement and organise the initial deployment and subsequent management of hardware and software to the business. The whole process should be driven by IT with the backing of senior management. The process would involve every stage from buying through to implementation and support. There should, as far as possible, be a common PC build with only one approved hardware and software configuration being tested and deployed fully by the organisation. The value of this is evident in providing a fully tested and supported environment to the business. Businesses would see the benefit of this almost immediately and this would raise the profile of IT within the organisation.

Stages for IT are as follows: