Technical Design and Technical Maintenance and Support

Technical Management organization

Technical Management is not normally provided by a single department or group. One or more Technical Support teams or departments will be needed to provide technical management and support for the IT Infrastructure. In all but the smallest organizations, where a single combined team or department may suffice, separate teams or departments will be needed for each type of infrastructure being used.

IT Operations Management consists of a number of technological areas. Each of these requires a specific set of skills to manage and operate it. Some skill sets are related and can be performed by generalists, whereas others are specific to a component, system or platform.

The primary criterion of Technical Management organizational structure is that of specialization or division of labour. The principle is that people are grouped according to their technical skill sets, and that these skill sets are determined by the technology that needs to be managed.

Sections 6.6 and 6.7 cover the organizational aspects of Technical Management in detail, but this list provides some examples of typical Technical Management teams or departments:

• Mainframe team or department – if one or more mainframe types are still being used by the organization
• Server team or department – often split again by technology types (e.g. Unix server, Wintel server)
• Storage team or department, responsible for the management of all data storage devices and media
• Network Support team or department, looking after the organization’s internal WANs/LANs and managing any external network supplier s
• Desktop team or department, responsible for all installed desktop equipment
• Database team or department, responsible for the creation, maintenance and support of the organization’s databases
• Middleware team or department, responsible for the integration, testing and maintenance of all middleware in use in the organization
• Directory Service s team or department, responsible for maintaining access and rights to service elements in the infrastructure
• Internet or Web team or department, responsible for managing the availability and security of access to servers and content by external customer s, user s and partners
• Messaging team or department, responsible for e-mail services
• IP-based Telephony team or department (e.g. VoIP).

Technical Management consists of specialist technical architects and designers (who are primarily involved during Service Design) and specialist maintenance and support staff (who are primarily involved during Service Operation).

In this publication, they are viewed as being part of the same function, but many organizations see them as two separate teams or even departments. The problem with this approach is that good design needs input from the people who are required to manage the solution – and good operation requires involvement from the people who designed the solution.

The problem s that need to be overcome are similar to those faced in managing the Application Lifecycle (see section 6.5 for a more detailed discussion). The solution will include the following elements:

• Support staff should be involved during the design or architecture of a solution. Design staff should be involved in setting maintenance objective s and resolving support issues.
• A change in how both Design and Support staff are measured. Designers should be held partly accountable for design flaws that create operational outages. Support staff should be held partly accountable for contribution to the technical architecture.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23