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Five Measures of Management (continued)

What is the ideal management structure for your organization? Young, Cameron and Greer agree that the best IT management structure parallels the business structure. "The management model defines what is optimized, what innovation is emphasized and where the revenue will be optimized," notes Young.

No matter which structure you choose, it should encompass five fundamental IT practices: infrastructure operations; new technology development; IT relationship management; architecture, planning and strategy; and the responsibilities of the office of the CIO -- human resources, finance and training.

Don't fall into the trap of making management structural decisions based on personalities. "The tendency in small-to-medium firms is to organize based on personalities instead of by role or IT process," warns Cameron. "Placing all architecture under the infrastructure operations manager makes it so that development has to come to ops for direction. This results in strange accumulations of responsibilities that create poor flow of work."

Five Measurements That Matter
There are five measurements that management can use to evaluate and plan IT staffing, regardless of the model:

• Employee time worked
• Staff turnover rates, both compared as a trend over time and against local HR trends
• Annual SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis, as analyzed by the IT and business staff
• Performance against specific objectives for quality and expense improvement
• Calculation of work done per dollar spent per user

In the end, good IT management boils down to adopting a structure that enables the entire department to distinguish busywork from profitable production. "You must be flexible enough to be able to react quickly to situations, but structured enough that nothing falls through the cracks," says Greer.

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