What makes an effective IT Management Team?
IT Managers and Decision Makers, this was written for you.
IT Departments come in all different shapes and sizes. There are however some key elements I would recommend for effective IT management. It’s important to certainly have strategy.
Here is my list:
Asset Management and Risk Assessment
Time and time again you will need to know what your on hand IT Assets are and associated Risks to those assets. This is important and empowering knowledge to have to make recommendations or make decisions that can help add money back into budget. Its always good to know how much time is left on your IT assets and when to retire them as well as getting the most you can in return for the sale of used equipment. Understanding Risk is important so as to ensure your assets will be best protected and your interests are best met. So there are different formulas for determining this, what’s important is that you have established due diligence toward this area to protect your business from significant liabilities.
Change Control
With technology advancing every moment, it is very important to limit risk when implementing changes to your infrastructure and technology. It’s always good to have management on the same page when you are driving change. Also communication to employees is key to increasing change awareness. There are many aspects of change control, what is most important with regards to change is planning and communication. If you fail to plan you are planning to fail. And failure to communicate is a structural breakdown which will only drive distraction, confusion, and inefficiency.
Active measures to reduce costs by going Green
Being Green is a buzz phrase we have been hearing a lot about. What does it really mean to be Green? In my view it means just being more efficient. Does that mean working your employees to the bone with multi-tasking? No, absolutely not. You have the potential with building a Green working environment to motivate your employees without the pay raises per-se, ie. a dollar saved is a dollar earned. With technology today this is very much possible from the front line all the way back up to the top. There are a lot of ways to be Green and we certainly can help you do that, with the problems in today’s economy it is essential to save money in order to stay in business while maintaining your competitive edge.
Release Readiness
Release Readiness is very important in the Change Control and Project Management aspects. With there being a lot of change in technology its important to be ready to effectively implement those changes. They can be hardware or software. Its important to be proactive and provide due diligence in technology management, as the very efficiency you seek through it will simply go backward with immature or incorrect technology implementations.
IT Security
As more and more companies go virtual, and data is their value. It is important then that assets, availability, reliability, and performance all be examines and protected. Threats can come from many different directions. It is important to understand the threats and risks and take action to protect against them. So there are many different types of measures to be taken when building a Security Baseline. I listed this step later on because obtaining a full understanding of your IT Assets is key along with doing a Risk Assessment. These two elements will help management understand what security measures need to be taken. You are only as strong as your weakest link, also keep in mind your business is as valuable to you as your desire to stay in business. There is a great deal of cyberfraud and startups that literally steal from their competitors. If you value staying in business you simply cannot ignore IT Security and pure and proper implementation practices. Saving money in a foolish manner can put you more at risk. But doing things smarter will save you money. As long as there are cyber criminals there will always be a need for cyber security.
Effective Communications
Each of these are important as they develop well rounded focus as we tackle the most complicated and diverse IT issues. It’s important to run a tight ship that collectively bears a scalable setup, and adaptable setup. In my personal view innovative managers and decision makers can utilize effectively their abilities to keep their employees motivated while adding to bottom dollar.
Let me know how you do, with giving your focus to these principles.
Efficiency through Technology and Quality by HPD Global SaaS Solutions
These days it is most important to take the business battle to strategic design. Some concerns with the Economy as it is are to find cheaper ways to increase efficiency without hurting quality. Technology is one strong avenue to do that through. Some careful attention should be given by management into various areas surrounding this. Consider the following:
What areas of your work flow can be automated?
How utilized is your present technology?
Have you considered efficiency through leverage of technology?
Could you double your output with quality by doing things different?
These questions help us better determine as management what areas we should push to resolution on a more level approach. I am going to make a bold statement about our present economic situation. I believe that the businesses the utilize creativity, strategic design, and technology toward doing things smarter (different) will be the companies that take us further into the new millenium and will be tomorrow’s successful companies. You have heard that the best way to win is thinking outside the box. Technology when implemented successfully with intelligent engineers will not only yield success but a peace of mind. You will want to ensure that you deal with solid Technology Experts when making these changes. To an extent it will involve vision and entrepreneurship, but it can be done. So this will be an area that all technology management will face if they have not faced it so far. It is the dynamics of where Global Business is going, you just have to think outside the box and be the first to the fight. HPD Global has multiple SaaS solutions you should contact us to save money.
Using Ubuntu Server as a Desktop and Cost Savings
Cost Savings and Technology advantages of Ubuntu Server
Most of you are familiar with GPL/GNU Open Source Software. I wanted to recommend a highly stable and cheap to free open source server. Ubuntu meaning ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other. The meaning behind the them is something quite intrinsic to the creation of the technology. In a humanity sense open source software allows individuals, groups, or entire communities to contribute in some way to the development of the software. The overall output of the product is of higher quality, testing, and also more in line with what the user wants.
Since Ubuntu open source you have the option to change it. So yes this is Linux. I wanted to state however that Ubuntu is the most supported version of Linux out there, and that you can do anything with it as you would a Windows Server. You have have the option to turn it into a desktop with a simple command line entry such as this:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
The wonderful thing about open source is you feel or get empowered through the transparency of what you observe. Also how you can customize and change things to better suit the needs of your IT department or Organization. So now on to the advantages. Ubuntu is a light weight server out of the box, or you can make it more robust. It can easily be converted into any type of back end server ie: File, Web, Email, Media, Authentication, Proxy, Code Repository, Load Balancing. Just about anything you want it can be turned into that. So let me point you to the documentation for reference so you will be able to observe and learn or consider the cost savings you can benefit from.
At HPD Global – VIT Cloud Services we run Ubuntu and several other open source solutions on top of traditional Microsoft Windows Server. We feel this brings greater value to our customers as they have the option to tailor the technologies we offer to better suit their needs. Contact us today for more IT Profitability.
Multiple Desktops in Windows
( Linux / *nix ) feel in Windows
Making Windows feel like an open source environment
There’s a cool app that helps you multi-task in an organized and efficient way in windows. If you have used Freebsd, Suse, Slackware, DSL, Fedora, RHEL, etc. They all have a few things different that Windows does not have, that is that they allow you to have multiple desktops. Now that is a good idea that allows efficient work to be done in each desktop. It helps to be able to track what you are triaging or working on. Here is a program that gives windows that functionality as well:
https://www.hpdit.com/sysinternals/Desktops.exe
Pretty cool…
Windows Server 2003-2008 How to tell if a Server is a VM
Many advanced tricks for determining what you have in a client’s server environment can be determine easily and quickly, as long as you have Admin access to that machine. It is easy to know how many physicals hosts you have.
In order for this trick to work you will need to have Admin rights to the machine. Assuming that this is the case you can then proceed first of all you will want to psexec to the machine then from there simply run a reg query. The following line of code is what you will want to put in:
C:\reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SystemInformation\
The results will be likely similar to the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SystemInformation
BIOSVersion REG_SZ 080112
BIOSReleaseDate REG_SZ 06/09/2009
SystemManufacturer REG_SZ Microsoft Corporation
SystemProductName REG_SZ Virtual Machine
InformationSource REG_DWORD 0×0
Fortune 500 IT Practices: Small to Medium Businesses
The Questions:
Don’t you wish you could have a budget to allow your IT departments to flourish without the additional cost of a full time staff, additional contractors, or H1B’s to further explode your budget into the point of no return?
Don’t you want to know if your IT infrastructure us functioning as successfully as that of a Fortune 500 company?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, then look no further; High Performance Delivered Global IT Consulting (100% US Based with US employees) is here to help you with all your technical needs.
With over 30 years of experience in Information Technology (IT) we have the solutions that will help you cut cost and increase your performance for your day to day Information Technology operations.
IT OUTSOURCE USA!
My favorite topic: Outsourcing to the US, what a wonderful concept!
This is why HPD Global IT Consulting believes in Outsourcing to the USA
- Better understanding of IT Products as most technology solutions are driven from the US
- High QA in terms of support as your IT Support Department speaks English as a primary language, most of the code the software was written in also was created by Primary English Speaking Developers
- Euros have more buying power in the USA so you can get more for your money
- There is far more ongoing Reliability, Usability, Development Research in the US, we are all linked in with each other and certainly very collaborative.
I think the time has come for international countries to pledge their support and give back regardless of trade treaties. It’s always a good thing to drive quality in your product and well paying for quality is a good thing, it will go much faster and you will no have to worry day to day what level of quality you are receiving by outsourcing to the other imitations. Believe me less headache. And for your short-term CEO’s or executives in the US you can definitely benefit from driving cheap quality solutions and IT outsourcing locally to the USA. Before jumping on the copycat business bandwagon do some real research. As always we are here to serve IT local and International Interests as you have Virtual Support needs. You want quality and Elite support, and we have that.
