IT Organization

It is important to determine your personnel resource needs and to assign project roles when planning your SMS configuration and deployment. To do this, you first must have an understanding of your current IT organization. You need this information during your SMS pre-planning, planning, and deployment phases, and also for post-deployment operational tasks.

Understand the breakdown of IT staff in your organization. For example, you might have one centralized IT unit whose members are in close communication. Or, you might have many decentralized units where communication is not optimal. Is there a central headquarters with IT responsibility, or many separate organizational units with widely varying goals and philosophies?

Create an organization chart that maps your IT organization to your geographic profile. Include the following in your organization chart:

• IT reporting hierarchy

• IT departmental divisions that produce an overlap in SMS tasks (for example, a department separate from the SMS team manages all database servers, including computers running SQL Server)

• Points where management control issues or policy issues exist

• Level of technical sophistication and security clearance of IT staff members who will be working with SMS before, during, or after SMS deployment

• Service level agreements for departments, end users, and IT groups

• Operating systems used to support the network and end users

• Change control policy

Management control issues might not seem important, but consider this: SMS security controls access by resource type. IT policy issues might exist regarding who controls which clients in which regions. In the planning phase you must address these issues. It is important to familiarize yourself with the IT structure, administrative policies, and any existing service level agreements early on in the process.

For More Information

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