IT Management Solutions and Maturity of IT departments

Having worked with numerous IT organizations around the world, it is quite interesting to see the difference in maturity and organization witnessed over the years at some of these. One side is the technical infrastructure, where shops grew fast without any standards and an enterprise level infrastructure is managed without naming standards, DNS and OS, network and applications standards. To my opinion these are the responsibility of the IT manager or technical leads of the administration and support teams. These are usually addressed with documents that the tech teams need to put together and eventually enforce these standards. Moving one layer higher, the IT director should get his people to put processes together for the various teams under him or her to work more organized and efficient. These areas should address infrastructure monitoring, incident management, release management and IT operational processes. Moving one more layer up to the CIO level, this level should address how all teams should interact between them and how to serve the business. The initiative for change management, asset management, service level management and incident management should come from the CIO who should force all directors and managers to enforce these inter-departmental functions. In quite a number of shops, the IT manager expects from the administrators to get together and come up with standards, the IT director expects from the technical administrators and their leads to come up with infrastructure management initiatives and solutions and the CIO expects from one director to enforce processes across areas that are not under his/hers responsibility with no backing from higher up. The result is an enterprise level IT organization that runs like a small IT group. Problems left and right, firefighting, finger pointing and eventually an IT organization that the business sees as necessary to the business as electricity. The failure of the IT department to run like a business is a major issue that prevents IT from showing it's value to the business and be regarded as a function critical to the business. The lack of consulting firms who can guide the customers to the right direction or the inability of the consulting firm to talk to the right level in the IT organization is also a major issue.
We have seen IT organizations with low maturity that addressed infrastructure management solutions as a tool to be used by the administrators to monitor servers, networks, etc. The management expects from the administrators who's job is to maintain the servers, networks, etc. to also monitor the infrastructure. This is the job of the IT Operations team and very rarely an administrator will proactively monitor the infrastructure. The managers fail to see the business gain from these solutions that is really the ability to find where the problem is right away and route it to the appropriate support team to fix it. I have heard IT managers going to the CIO or IT director with a request for few hundred thousand dollars and when their management asks "What is it going to do for us?" the answer is that it will tell us if a hard drive is about to fill up or if our backup failed... this would be similar to someone asking their parents for college money and when asked what they'll do with that money, the answer would be "I'll live in dorms, attend classes and get a paper". Any CIO would be out of his mind if he or she approved a requisition for few hundred thousand on the basis that it would tell his techies that a hard drive is full...
Moving on to Service Support, this is a more difficult area in the sense that it usually involves multiple departments in the design and implementation of such solution. We have seen IT managers who do not understand ITIL processes and how things should work, who inquire about a service desk solution and in their mind they are looking for a help desk software. When they hear the prices they freak out and they are right, since they are looking to buy a moped and they see the price for a large truck. However, their approach is wrong to begin with. You do not manage the finance department of a large company the same way you run bookeeping for a small company and these are the signs of an immature IT organization. We have witnessed maturity growth in Telecom organizations and particularly GSM providers and our business is growing fast in that sector. However, the banking IT organizations still have way to go before they address IT Management solutions that will be used appropriately and see high return on investment. We as Parallon typically have a high cost of sales development since it involves educating the customer during a long sales cycle but the results are encouraging when the customer reaches a level of maturity and we see initiatives coming from inside the company seeking to improve IT efficiencies and the quality of services.