IT management Practices in Organisations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

IT management Practices in Organisations - Essay Example The underdeveloped system saps the managers’ ability to make informed decisions while planning for the IT, and the plans most turn out to be impracticable. â€Å"Deficiency in executing the plan formulated has led to a disjoint mode of implementation of technology† (Misra, 2006, p. 49). The system and organizational culture in SMEs is in the nascent stage and is not strong enough to address the loopholes in the organization and integration of IT in the work setup. Organizations take time to develop. In the start, one individual may represent one whole department because of human resource constraints imposed to minimize the expenditures and make the business profitable. Strategies entrepreneurs commonly adopt to limit the expenditure include but are not limited to increased manual work to save the expenditure of purchasing machines, overloading of work on the employees, more working hours, and reduced benefits for the organizational personnel. SMEs that do invest in mach ines do not have an efficient repair and maintenance system in place to ensure that the machines are fully functional all the time. A small dysfunction may take days to be fixed, which not only distorts the process of communication and drawing of information using technology, but also serves as a disincentive for the organizational personnel to rely on the use of technology to accomplish their daily tasks. As a result, there occurs a shift from machine work to the manual work, that in effect lowers the efficiency of the system as well as increases the work-load upon the employees further. Like all employees down the line, leaders are no less affected by the lack of planning and organization. Although leaders are primarily responsible for decision making as well as the planning and organization of IT, yet they are not able to achieve their optimal potential in leadership because of the resource constraints imposed by the owners of SMEs. Involvement of the CEO and the external IT expe rtise has a major influence on the success of IT management in SMEs (Thong et al., 1997). Unfortunately, most of the entrepreneurs/owners of SMEs are just rich enough to establish a new firm, and may not necessarily be qualified enough to lead the companies themselves. Like all other areas of IT management, controlling of IT is no less complicated in SMEs because of the aforementioned reasons. However, it is not appropriate to conclude that IT management in SMEs is absolutely inexistent. Although management of IT in SMEs is not comparable to that in large enterprises, yet various studies have concluded that there has occurred immense improvement in management of human resources as well as IT over the years (Suraweera, Cragg, & Mills, 2010, p. 1). Q. 2: Answer Before identifying the important practices in each of the four areas of IT management, it is customary to briefly discuss the concept of IT management as it helps in understanding the role of different departments in addition t o the IT department in the IT management. IT management is a very broad topic that covers activities that include but are not limited to the management of IT resource as a weapon of attaining competitive advantage, management of the resources of IT like the technical infrastructure and the organizational personnel, and establishment and accurate functioning of the information systems (Luftman, 2004). In the