After getting the backing of the board and top management, I put into place a separate department just to deal with fires and put a small team to work on fixing the infrastructure. It took only a very few months for the corporate culture to change. Today there is a positive spirit and a strong sense of teamwork. We are converging a large number of smaller environments into a small number of larger systems. This allows us to move from a tactical mode of trying to keep up with requests to a strategic mode of optimizations and planning.
Simplification also reduces support requirements, costs, and number of hours the staff has to work.
All good things when morale needs to be managed as well as cost. Become a true partner with the business units, and the CFO and ensure that your services enable them to win at business and personal levels. In many ways Sound Off functions as a hotline to a panel of CIOs working in a wide array of industries and organizational settings. As operator of that hotline, I want make sure that I am consistently addressing the issues that make you or break you as you try to do your jobs. Tell us what you think.