Shedding Light On the Black Art of IT Management

Cathy writes "An article by Harvard's Andrew McAfee tells nontechnical managers how not to get overwhelmed by the 'drumbeat' of IT projects. McAfee breaks down IT into three categories — functional, network, and enterprise — and says that this framework 'can also indicate which IT initiatives are going to be relatively easy to implement and on which projects executives should focus. In that light, IT management starts to look less like a black art and more like the work of the executive.'"

Comments

Black Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the techniques for managing IT Operations have been known for decades. It's just that each generation seems to insist on learning everything the hard way. Believe it or not, the mainframe folks in the 1970s really did know a lot about IT Operations.

Other than thst, the biggest problem I see today is middle managers on up not bothering to talk to their technical people and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on poorly configured equipment.