【導(dǎo)讀】inferred.othercountries.owners.

　　

【正文】 iness if any element of defined support fails to meet the desired goals or requirements. While human resources are a significant business expense, allowing any aspect of the business to fall down because the right support is not available when required ultimately costs the business more in terms of lost sales, lost product or service revenue, lost productivity, lost customer confidence, or even lost customers. A lack of appropriate support can also have a negative impact upon the internal employees of the pany, affecting their morale and productivity. Therefore, staffing levels should be wholly adequate to meet the support needs of the business at all times. While it is difficult to predict exactly how many staff to add to the operations workforce, there are thumbnail guidelines that take into account the considerations discussed earlier to assist the human resources manager in making these determinations. These are as follows: ? Understand exactly what support requirements the business has from the standpoint of the infrastructure, architecture, anizational distribution, and supported applications (offtheshelf, custom, or specialized). ? Understand exactly what is expected from the operations workforce by municating with the service level management function regularly to ensure staffing levels are appropriate to meet the inplace SLAs. ? Understand exactly what the users of the pany are doing. Are they office automation users? Do they perform data entry or provide customer service? If the kind of function the users perform or provide is exactly known, it is easier to determine how to appropriately staff for their needs. ? Understand what kind of kind of support needs to be provided, as well as when and to what extent—for example, national or international businesses that have a variety of needs spanning multiple time zones. Hiring and Retention Considerations With the required number of operations staff defined, the human resources manager needs to ensure that the proper skill sets have been applied to the proper services. Assessment and analysis of the workforce, as well as the changing support needs of the anization, may require the human resources manager to reeducate, reallocate, or hire/outsource new resources to adequately meet the support needs of the enterprise. The human resources manager looks at the services required, the allocated budget, return on investment (ROI) analysis, and related SLAs and performs a gap analysis to identify areas for improvement. Service Management Function 13 Employee skill areas include: ? Nontechnical skills, including customer service, problem solving approaches and troubleshooting techniques, general munication, stress management, and conflict resolution skills. ? Team skills, which are also vital to the operation of IT support. The support team must be able to share information and function as a unit to provide quality customer service. To a customer, the operations workforce is only as effective as the last time it provided a service. Effective, efficient, and highquality service is best delivered through a team approach. ? Technical skills that are needed to support the technology deployed by the IT anization to its customers. This includes knowledge of standard hardware and software, unique products and services, and munication and connectivity tools. ? Technical skill development may seem straightforward, but the existence of the right set of skills in the current anization may not be readily available. If not available, the required skill sets should be developed or hired. When they are available, it is critical that these resources be evenly distributed and that backup staff possessing the requisite skills be available to be called upon in case of staffing shortages due to vacations, illness, and so on. The smaller the number of staff that possesses a particular skill, the higher the risk to the anization in cases of staff nonavailability caused by absence, turnover, or other factors. Attracting, Developing, and Keeping Strong IT Operations Staff Attracting and retaining a strong operations staff is critical to running a costeffective and efficient IT anization. This applies not only in corporate enterprises, but also within the proliferation of online businesses as brickandmortar stores create their online presence. Now, more than ever, IT is changing the way everyone does business, and the rate of change is increasing at a spectacular rate. With the rapid evolution toward online sales and services requiring technically astute knowledge workers, petition in the IT industry to attract and keep the bestqualified and most talented workers has always been keen. In order to attract and keep these workers, good pensation is not only a key factor, but also a basic assumption. As a result, salaries and benefits for IT professionals have increased substantially in the last few years. To truly give merit to the value of IT operations staff, panies must address a key cultural issue. Historically, many panies viewed developers as the elite of the technical staff. They were the visionaries and the doers of the “cool” technical work. When plete, code would be handed over to the operations groups to “just run it.” Or, in software panies such as Microsoft, the majority of the code developed in years past was put in a shrinkwrapped box and shipped to partners and customers to integrate and operate. But with the Inter, ebusiness, more mature and plex IT solutions, and particularly the new “Extra” model that enterprises are embracing to do business together, operations is changing its role and being the very heart and soul of the anization. It can positively or negatively affect virtually every aspect of the business. Evidence of the growing importance of IT operations includes the recognitio