ICT Infrastructure Management Processes

1. ICT Design and Planning

These processes help you decide which technology to adopt and maintain—and which to sunset. Use them throughout every product’s lifecycle: research, selection, introduction, maintenance, and sunsetting.

When you use ICT design and planning processes, it’s easy to determine the best technological path for your organization.

For example, your IT architecture team may decide to discontinue support for pagers. They might recommend a new solution, like push notifications. The team would formally sunset pager use and give everyone a specific date to switch to the smartphone application. Then, the team would use ICT deployment processes to make sure the smartphones are available on time.

 

2. ICT Deployment Management

Making changes to hardware and software can be risky to your business. But with ICT deployment management processes, you can make sure hardware and software changes have the least possible impact.

ICT deployment processes control the introduction of hardware and software changes into your operating environment. Use these processes to guide activities in both production and test environments. And then you’ll be able to minimize the impact on your business (and customers).

Using a performance monitoring tool will help you keep an eye on the impact of changes. Plus, it will help you meet service level agreements (SLAs). It can even help you detect performance problems and fix them before they impact your customers. And that makes everyone—your team and your customers—happy.

 

3. ICT Operations Management

There’s plenty of day-to-day work that goes into monitoring and maintaining IT operations. But ICT operations management processes make it easier to manage the day-to-day.

It’s a best practice to adopt ICT operations management processes for things like job scheduling, data management (including backup and recovery), and database administration.

You can even make it easy by using capacity planning tools. You’ll be able to check in on the health of your applications and infrastructure. And you can even use predictive tools to help job schedulers understand the impact of schedule changes.

 

4. ICT Technical Support

Good technical support helps you solve—and prevent—problems. That’s why ICT technical support is the final component to ICT infrastructure management.

ICT technical support primarily serves as a support to other ICT processes. You should have some of your best and brightest technicians on your technical support team.

Here are a few common ways that ICT technical support comes into play.

• They provide Level 3 problem determination for the entire IT community.
• They do technical evaluations in ICT design and planning processes. These might be proof of concept (POC) or even pilot tests of new technology. Or they might be request for information (RFI) and request for price (RFP) processes. Those typically require detailed configuration and specification information.
• They act as a liaison with vendors on technical matters. And they also create and maintain the technical library and technical knowledge base for your organization.