Competency 2 Reflection Managing IT Resources

Successfully managing IT resources requires numerous best practices. Over the years, the
importance of technology in organizations has increasingly evolved, including helping in
executing tasks critical to improving performance. Several best practices in managing IT
resources can assist organizations in attaining competitive advantage over their competitors. The
first one includes securing and maintaining executive management support or buy-in. It is vital to
acknowledge that the support and commitment from top executives in an organization can help
IT project planners implement successful enterprise resource management initiatives (Lee,
2007). With the support of the top management, IT departments can receive the necessary
funding and skilled personnel to help in upgrading and improving IT resources in an
organization.
The other best practice for managing IT resources in organizations is aggregating all the
IT demand. Notably, many organizations often focus on tracking the demand for IT projects
without integrating the resources’ work for non-project operational work. Failure to consider the
IT resources’ work overlooks some of the resources, unfortunately leading to project delays.
Organizations have a responsibility to ensure that all the operational work is incorporated into
the overall resource planning process to gain visibility of all the needs of IT resources (Lee,
2007). Additionally, automation of requests for IT resources allows for streamlining of all the
approvals and assignments. Notably, centralizing resource requests, especially by establishing
resource pool managers, works well for many organizations because project delays are minimal.

Types of Software

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Organizations have a wide pool of software to choose from in today’s tech-savvy business
world, depending on their need. Organizations can purchase and deploy software based on their
organizational goals. One of the types of software is commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS),
which is uniquely adapted aftermarket to match the desires of the purchasing company. COTS
has several advantages from the perspective of an IT manager. First, COTS are easy to
implement because the solution has been developed. The only thing required when one wants to
use the software is purchasing and installing it. Additionally, IT managers can access reviews of
the software from users before they can opt to install it (Scheeline, 2010). Insights from the
reviews help an IT manager establish all the issues associated with the software and how to
resolve them. The main disadvantage of COTS is that it is less flexible because the IT managers
cannot make any changes to it.
The other type of software is a software as a service (SaaS), a software licensing and
delivery model centrally hosted in the cloud. One of the advantages of SaaS is that its upfront
costs are lower, and thus IT managers do not have to invest heavily. Additionally, SaaS is easy to
set up and deploy. The main disadvantage of SaaS is that it does not provide control to the users
because third parties are in charge of that. The other type of software is custom-developed
software developed for specific organizations. From the perspective of an IT manager, it is
advantageous because it is tailor-made, and thus it meets the organization’s needs (Lettner et al.,
2013). The main disadvantage of custom-developed software is that it is expensive, and IT
managers should choose wisely based on the goals of an organization.

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References
Lee, R. (2007). IT resource management best practices.
https://www.datamation.com/applications/it-resource-management-best-practices/
Lettner, D., Petruzelka, M., Rabiser, R., Angerer, F., Prähofer, H., & Grünbacher, P. (2013,
August). Custom-developed vs. model-based configuration tools: Experiences from an
industrial automation ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 17th International, Software
Product Line Conference co-located workshops (pp. 52-58).
Scheeline, A. (2010). Teaching, learning, and using spectroscopy with commercial, off-the-shelf
technology. Applied Spectroscopy, 64(9), 256A-268A.