4 Steps to Smarter IT Use

By: TKristiansen

While IT management tools are important for getting more out of corporate IT resources, managers wanting smarter organizations can follow the following guidelines put forth by Harvard Business Review’s contributor Susan Cramm. The author contends that organizational change is better implemented using human psychology instead of just logic.

1.    “Target people who like change.” Offer special support such as education and advanced tools to gifted and talented IT users, in order to hasten the implementation of intelligent IT use.

2.    “Don't rely on classroom training to change behaviors.” Cramm says surveyed business managers want to 1) get optimal performance out of their current technology, and understand its capabilities and opportunities 2) “make IT-enabled strategy and invest responsibly, 3) deliver complex solutions, and 4) learn how to work with IT.” Open iT’s resource management tools deliver exactly the mix these leaders are looking for to get optimal efficiency and performance from their hardware, software and most importantly, their users.

 

3.    “Empower people to fulfill their IT-related needs on their own.” Helping users generate their own reports, and making configuration tools for defining data values, screen layouts, and process flows available was second and third on Cramm’s list for empowering people to meet their own IT needs. Open iT’s software has an easy-to-use interface for making reports, where the user can define their own data values, process flows, and report outputs. The fourth point for empowering workers entails teaching leaders “how to fulfill key project roles, starting with designing business processes, defining high level requirements, managing change and, over time, building the capabilities necessary to directly managing projects and larger scale programs.” All of these points would be much easier to accomplish using Open iT’s software to see trends and get an overview of how employees are using IT resources.

 

4.    “Provide incentives for the right behavior.” Cramm says to provide positive rewards for desired IT usage behavior and punishment for unproductive behavior. She suggests having tools for self-service available for free while charging for services users still require the IT department to provide. Again, Open iT tools used for chargeback could help with charging for services users continue to delegate to IT. Finally Cramm points out the use of peer pressure to broadcast the achievements of workers who are demonstrating desired behavior.

Cramm concludes that with self-sufficiency as a key focus for IT, in time, business managers will lead independently with IT-enabled innovations. Once daily support from the IT department becomes a thing of the past, IT-enabled growth and development by the rest of the workforce will accelerate greatly.

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