IT Department Goals

One of your goals as an IT Manager is to align yourself and your department to the goals of the company.  The size or type of business is irrelevant.  It doesn’t make any difference if you are an IT Director for Wal-Mart or a front-line working manager at small non-profit company.  It is your responsibility to discover the company goals and align with them.

Alignment
If you work for a for a manufacturing company such as DR Horton Homes as an Applications Manager, your goals might be to help the organization manufacture quality homes at a reduced cost through developing software and analytics that reduce waste at the job sites by ordering the right quantity of timber already pre-cut to the right lengths.  If you work for a non-profit charity feeding the hungry as a Desktop Support Manager, your goals may be to help save money by forcing PCs to sleep at night thus saving electric costs.

While we firmly believe it is your boss’s responsibility to communicate the corporate goals to you, it is ultimately your responsibility as a management professional to seek them out and align to them.  If your company makes widgets for the widget retailers, are you doing everything you can to support them in selling their widgets to said retailers?  Is the manufacturing line in need of newer more efficient software?  Can a simple code change increase the efficiency of the robot injection molders?

The Value of an IT Manager
IT is the new world of corporate growth and strategies. Most executives are now proficient with Excel, Word and PowerPoint as well as Blackberries and SmartPhones. However, most of these executives are not familiar with the intricate details of how these or other systems work below the surface. They see IT as magical and complex, producing great rewards and having lots of risk. Executives need and pursue IT Managers who can help them understand and execute their IT goals and manage their risk while keeping the underlying technicalities to a minimum.

One mistake many new IT Managers make is putting their interests and desires ahead of the company’s. It should be your goal to make sure that the company’s goals are first, and yours second. Does this mean you can’t accomplish your goals as well? Absolutely not! Often by putting the company directives first in your priorities and accomplishing wins for the company and yourself you’ll find the company will be more open to your goals and interests in the future, as your relationship strengthens together. A new Change Management system for example may really help your department be more efficient in the future, but will it help sell more widgets today?