7 steps to turning around an inherited IT department

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Congratulations, you’ve just inherited your predecessor’s IT dumpster fire. Now, it’s up to you to get essential operations back on track. Here’s how to get started.

It may be the toughest job in IT — and perhaps the most rewarding. Taking on a troubled IT department isn’t a job for the faint of heart. Repairing damage and putting things back in order will require a great deal of time and effort. If you succeed, you’ll be lauded as a hero. If you fail, your washout could haunt your career for years to come.

Getting a derailed IT department back on track requires persistence and a success-focused action plan. The following seven steps will help you get started.

1. Assess IT’s ability to support business goals

Assessing an inherited IT department’s alignment with business strategies and objectives is an important first step toward rebuilding it. “In today’s increasingly digital world, IT plays a key role in enabling business strategy,” says Rahul Singh, managing director of Pace Harmon, an IT management consulting firm.

Ensuring alignment with business goals is necessary for IT to be viewed as a strategic business partner. “Engaging with the business will help one discover what’s working versus what isn’t working, to identify the most pressing challenges and how deep the issues go,” Singh explains.

The new leader must also assess whether the IT department, in its current state, is even capable of providing operational stability. “It’s hard to be seen as a strategic partner when ‘keeping the lights on’ is an issue,” Singh notes.

2. Stabilize the situation

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Direct-hire Azure Engineer Opportunity With Great Company in Richardson, TX

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Azure Cloud Engineer

Position Summary

Azure Engineer

The Azure Cloud Engineer would need to have at least 3 to 5 years of experience. This Candidate’s primary responsibilities include responsibility for the design/planning, management, support, and oversight of the environment.

This Candidate will assist with managing, maintaining, monitoring and securing (including data security) of all servers including installations, upgrades, patches and documentation.

The Azure Cloud Engineer will work across the enterprise to coordinate with the various stakeholders. This is an experienced individual contributor position that will work with cross-functional team members for day-to-day support and engineering activities.

The right candidate for our Azure Cloud Engineer will be well versed in networking concepts like VPN, routing, NAT and security protocols. Additional responsibilities will include developing scripting/automation for network devices and Microsoft Azure services, Windows server administration, and configuration management of the IaaS environment. Emphasis will also be placed on contributing to infrastructure monitoring and alerting capabilities for the IaaS and PaaS resources.

Requirements

  • Reviews on the architecture and design deliverables and support as an SME.
  • Ensure knowledge transfer with team members.
  • Work with new technologies so that the solution is current and meets quality standards and business requirements.
  • Gather specifications and deliver solutions to the organization based on understanding of a cloud and hybrid premise based technology.
  • Train and develop team members so as to ensure that there is an adequate supply of trained manpower in the said technology and deliver risks are mitigated.
  • Identify alternatives, pros and cons, and make recommendations.
  • Anticipate when architectural change will be needed and prepare the organization for a successful transition.
  • Support public and hybrid cloud-based, optimized environment, with event driven metrics, elastically scalable designs that are fault tolerant.
  • Drive public and hybrid cloud-based, proof-of-concept prototypes that assess the feasibility of solutions and demonstrate to our clients how technology can be leveraged.
  • Identify, analyze and resolve the most complex public and hybrid cloud-based issues.
  • Identify and balance risks and rewards to meet objectives.
  • Establish relationships with strategic public and hybrid cloud vendors to acquire knowledge develop partnerships, and collaborate on potential architectural solutions and technology acquisitions.
  • Work with Infrastructure and Business Solution teams to manage service and support of the Azure Cloud environment.
  • Experience in scripting for automation, provisioning, and scalability
  • Extensive experience with Windows servers and systems deployment and administration concepts (AD and Azure AD)
  • A high degree of understanding of networking concepts like VPNs, NAT, IP routing, ACLs
  • Extensive experience with server virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V)

Experience

  • Direct experience in Cloud platform technologies – Amazon or Microsoft Azure.
  • Three (3) years’ experience and proven success in Azure design, support and management within a large-scale organization.
  • Knowledge of virtual application delivery technologies and virtual desktop infrastructures including knowledge of disaster recovery concepts.
  • Experience with backup technologies (IBM TSM, VEEAM Preferred).
  • 5+ years of experience setting up and configuring build servers and build agents.
  • Experience with deployment tools and virtual lab management.
  • Experience building and deploying with Windows technologies.
  • Experience supporting and documenting build and configuration changes throughout environments.
  • Understanding of industry standard system architecture and system management tools.
  • Experience in the design, deployment, and support of large, complex systems.
  • Ongoing management of configuration and layout of VMware virtual infrastructure.
  • Experience in cost optimization of cloud deployments for applications.
  • Proficiency with MS Office Applications (Word, Excel, Visio).
  • Azure Infrastructure: 5 years (Required)
  • Scripting: 7 years (Required)
  • LAN/WAN: 10 years (Required)
  • Windows Administration: 10 years (Required)
  • VMware Administration: 7 years (Required)
  • Azure certifications a plus

If you have this experience, feel you are a fit for this position, and are interested, please answer the questions below:

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    Upload Your Resume

    Regards,

    Mike Hanes
    ProVisionTech

    Dallas IT Recruiter Guy

    972-200-7171

    Save Time, The Best Resources, Guaranteed!

    IT’s latest survival skill: Embracing risk

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    In today’s digital business world, IT has to stop playing it safe, as you can’t innovate without taking some risks. Still most IT professionals remain deeply risk-averse.

    If you’ve spent your career in IT, you’ve probably gotten really good at making sure nothing goes wrong. Outages are unacceptable, even if they’re only a few seconds long. Cybersecurity is a constant worry. Success is measured in reliability and availability. Your most important skill is anticipating issues and fixing them before they occur.

    There’s just one problem. In this time of rapidly changing technology and upstart industry disruptors, making risk avoidance your top priority will only help you get left behind. You can’t play it safe, because there’s no such thing as safe. In today’s digital business world, IT leaders must accept and even embrace a certain amount of uncertainty and risk. Even more challenging, they must help the people who work for them embrace it as well.

    “Risk is always relative,” says Scott Buchholz, CTO of Deloitte Consulting’s government practice. “Getting out of bed in the morning and taking a shower is taking a risk. But when we talk about risk in IT, what we sometimes mean is doing things that have a higher than normal chance of failure. And the reason that’s important is that technology is changing very quickly and there are fewer and fewer people who understand all the implications. Being able to handle risk becomes increasingly important.”

    Read more here

    Keeping your software and systems integration ahead of the curve

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    Integration of software and systems is an effective strategy in terms of reducing costs and increasing performance. It begins with the software designer who assembles units and components and then adds a quality assurance team that validates a consistent arrangement of the software and components.

    I have found that the best integration plans contain system level standards, practices and enhancements of continuous improvement (CI) /continuous delivery (CD) and non-CI /CD system software.

    The nature of technology requires companies to upgrade and enhance capabilities continually. However, some enterprises execute processes and workflows manually; and as a result, it is not cost effective. Here are some examples of technology upgrades that benefit from integration of software and systems.

    1. DevOps: The success of a development team can be measured by throughput and stability. The former can be defined as the frequency of production releases, while the latter refers to the time required to heal and/or recover the application. DevOps aims at increasing coordination between development and operations teams by automating repeatable tasks and developing a continuous delivery pipeline. The results: faster time to market, increase in frequency of production deployments and shorter lead-time for addressing issues and fixes. If your organization expects to achieve these outcomes, it should be using a proven-effective product for managing the latest upgrades and operations.

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    Where in the cloud is IT headed?

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    The cloud permeates all facets of IT — from applications to infrastructure. To find out how tech leaders are planning their cloud strategy, Insider Pro interviewed hundreds of tech decision-makers.

    The new hot topic in the tech industry has been around since – and this is a conservative estimate – the early 2000s. 

    It’s taken us a while to get where we are today, but these days the cloud permeates all facets of an IT environment – from applications to platforms to infrastructure. A quick look at the leading public cloud service providers – AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM —  shows the competition is fierce among vendors and the decision-making process for technology buyers isn’t for the faint of heart.

    With the roster of vendor-behemoths chasing your cloud dollars, it comes as no surprise that the stakes are high. In its Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide, IDC predicts that spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will more than double between now and 2023 with public cloud spending, growing from $229 billion in 2019 to nearly $500 billion in 2023.

    IDC reports that software as a service will be the largest category of cloud computing, capturing more than half of all public cloud spending. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will be the second largest category of public cloud spending, followed by platform as a service (PaaS). IaaS spending, comprised of servers and storage devices, will also be the fastest growing category of cloud spending

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    IT Self-Service: Making IT Support Cheaper and More Efficient

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    While the above-mentioned research holds true, a poorly deployed IT self-service can cost you your long-standing client base. Before investing, know below what the technology offers you apart from cost savings:

    Improved Cost Savings: Instead of dedicating a human resource, IT self-service technology is capturing incidents and taking service requests. There is an option for customers to solve their problems themselves too by accessing the knowledge base. For this to be possible, end users must adapt to this technology for IT to earn better revenues and ROIs. Also, the technology should not be limited to the replacement of telephone calls or emails. Backend workflow and automation should undergo continuous upgrades to leverage the technology to its entirety.

    Reduced Manual Labor: With IT self-service, there would be fewer calls to service desk agents. Ticket volumes will lessen and, as a result, service desk work volume. Moreover, self-service requests are mostly not urgent so the agents can focus on that after priority tickets and service level targets.

    Improvement in Issue and Report Prioritization: To serve customer’s immediate gratification, agents have drifted from working on priority to first-in-first-out mode. Self-service resolves the simple issues for the customers thereby helping the agents to prioritize urgent work.

    Better Consumer Experience: End-users want consumer-level IT self-service offerings when they bring in their own devices to work. They too want to log issues, choose from service request catalogs, and skim through the knowledge base. This is possible with IT self-service technology.

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    The future of IT leadership: 5 new roles CIOs must master

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    If you think technology leaders’ jobs have changed a lot over the past few years, just wait. Here are five new roles all CIOs must take on in the years ahead.

    It’s more than an understatement to say the role of technology leaders has changed over the past few years.

    The widespread adoption of cloud computing and process automation has reduced the demands for IT departments to keep the lights on. Large-scale capital expenditures on infrastructure are being replaced by increased operating expenses on services. Meanwhile, the pressure to take an active leadership role in the business’s digital transformation is greater than ever.

    “If you looked at CIOs ten years ago, they spent an inordinate amount of time in the lower parts of the stack and in the data center,” says Archana Rao, CIO for Atlassian, makers of collaboration tools like Trello and Jira. “The emergence of cloud and business process automation have shifted us away from old-school operational CIOs and into business enablers.”

    In a few years we’ll see the emergence of “the Bionic CIO,” predicts Jay Venkat, senior partner and managing director for Boston Consulting Group.

    “They’ll transcend what’s traditionally been called information technology and teach the business how to become more digitally enabled,” he says. “They’ll need to understand not only technology but also its impact on the workforce. And if they want to become the ‘Bionic CIO,’ they’ll have to upskill themselves.”

    What will the CIO job look like in five years? Technology leaders will need to be equally adept at five new roles. 

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    How to better integrate IT security and IT strategy

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    Organizations see a future in which IT security is deeply woven into their overall IT strategy. Here’s how they plan to get there.

    Information security has become such an integral part of IT that at a growing number of organizations, the two are virtually indistinguishable — from an organizational standpoint.

    Many companies are attempting to more tightly integrate IT security strategy with IT strategy. That can mean blending departments, changing leadership structures, and embedding security earlier in the development pipeline, among other tactics.

    About two thirds of organizations say their IT security strategy and IT strategy are tightly integrated, with IT security being a key component of IT roadmaps and projects, according to CIO’s 2019 State of the CIO survey.

    But looking ahead, the two become even more indistinguishable, with 83 percent of organizations expecting to tightly integrate IT security strategy into their overall IT strategy within the next three years.

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    What is NoOps? The quest for fully automated IT operations

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    Automation has IT leaders eyeing the possibility of environments with no hands-on operations work. But this evolution of DevOps may be more pipedream than practical reality.

    Automation has become a widely used tool for streamlining IT operations, and Mindtree is one such organization removing manual processes from its infrastructure as it moves toward delivering a more fully automated environment.

    The consulting and managed service provider’s strategy follows an ambitious goal prevalent in many tech organizations: To get away from the conventional work of IT operations and let machines handle it instead.

    Such an environment, where there’s virtually no hands-on operations work, could deliver a faster, more frictionless development and deployment experience — meaning better turnaround times for business requests for new functions and services, says Rene Head, global vice president of infrastructure at Mindtree.

    “It’s not just about IT delivery excellence; it’s a win for the business as well,” Head says.

    That’s the promise of NoOps, an emerging IT trend that is pushing some organizations beyond the automation provided by DevOps to an infrastructure environment that requires no operations work.

    What is NoOps?

    NoOps is the idea that the software environment can be so completely automated that there’s no need for an operations team to manage it. NoOps, for “no operations,” is a concept that pushes forward a trend that has been on the march for a decade or more.

    To be clear, NoOps is not the same as outsourcing your IT operations. It’s not about moving to SaaS or the cloud and expecting those vendors to run operations — although both managed service providers, such as Mindtree, and cloud companies are indeed on the NoOps journey themselves to gain more speed and agility in their own infrastructure.

    Read more here

    The future of IT leadership: 5 new roles CIOs must master

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    If you think technology leaders’ jobs have changed a lot over the past few years, just wait. Here are five new roles all CIOs must take on in the years ahead.

    It’s more than an understatement to say the role of technology leaders has changed over the past few years.

    The widespread adoption of cloud computing and process automation has reduced the demands for IT departments to keep the lights on. Large-scale capital expenditures on infrastructure are being replaced by increased operating expenses on services. Meanwhile, the pressure to take an active leadership role in the business’s digital transformation is greater than ever.

    “If you looked at CIOs ten years ago, they spent an inordinate amount of time in the lower parts of the stack and in the data center,” says Archana Rao, CIO for Atlassian, makers of collaboration tools like Trello and Jira. “The emergence of cloud and business process automation have shifted us away from old-school operational CIOs and into business enablers.”

    Read more here