For me, there are three main factors that support a good IT Management infrastructure. These are:

• Understanding the business requirement
• Managing financial committments
• Managing the human element

The third one I can address quite quickly. In my present employ there is just me. In the past at previous employs I have managed teams of up to elevent people including diverse fields such as Helpdesk, Support and Software Development so managing the people aspect well, from experience, is essential. However, I am currently a department of one. Two if you include my boss, the FD/IT Director. Because there is just me a lot of formal procedures are typically done away with because they are mostly in my head, however that’s not always a good thing and something which can’t easily be addressed given the time pressures I am regularly under.

The second aspect is managing the finanical committments. This includes:

• IT fixed assets
• Service Contracts
• Support Contracts
• The ‘Budget’
• Ongoing Costs such as Consumables
• EDI and other Electronic Costs
• Supplier Relationship Management

The third item, and the first listed above is understanding the business requirement. This is listed first above as IMHO it is the most important aspect of what we do as IT professionals however it is often the most difficult. In our company, we have no formal communication process or procedure for communicating information from the board or other management teams so gaining insight into the business priorities is often a case of trying to balance incoming, seemingly disparate, requests from members of the company. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it as the mushroom system especially as many of the things that go on are typically confidential to some degree so keeping the loop small is understandably desirable.

So those are the three factors that I believe form the basis for IT Management and I’m interested to see how they match up to the ITIL documentation I have been receiving.