Information Technology for Managers - Research Paper Example

It must be noted that there are three possible choices for employees and people who would actually be working on the projects and they are ‘the own staff’, ‘consultants’, and the ‘outsource firms’. The above figure shows the mapping for three areas of acquiring custom designs, application package and carrying out the ongoing operations. The ‘own staff’ model has a typical structure of a project manager, developers, testers and so on and is best suited for areas such as infrastructure maintenance, help desk support, back up and so on.

In his article on team management, written for the Sloan’s Management Review, Lucas (2006) speaks of the composition, role, and function of the IT team. According to the author, the IT industry does not have too many Generalists but rather specialists who would be looking after specific aspects of the business. Typically, the top and the middle rungs of the team structure would have different roles such as manager, CIO, process manager, the project manager, and the technical staff. Each of these roles would have certain responsibilities and functions and while there is a certain amount of pyramid structure and hierarchy, all roles have to coordinate their efforts for the project to be successful.

Wiseman (2004) points out that small project or organizations that may not have large IT initiatives would have a smaller and focussed IT team. Large organizations, on the other hand, would have a full-fledged department that looks at IT as the driver for change management and to bring inefficiencies and improvements in the firm. For such organizations, the author has suggested a multi-layers organization as illustrated in the following figure.e, Lucas (2007, p. 171) points out that in some cases, the IT team has to be viewed in context with the model of development that the organization has adopted and the model could be in-house development, outsourcing or offshoring.