A little bit of my History

I used to work in an IT environment where most of the IT decisions are made by the corporate IT HQ, based in Australia. They practice centralization where they have different IT personnel specialize in different field such as email, network administration, web development, and support and windows administration. Each site will only have one or two IT supports depending on the number of staffs.

During my probation period, most of the tasks needed to be done through the permission from the corporate IT. However, after much communication with them, they started to delegate the decisions to us except the tasks which are needed to be done from their end.

I learnt from my manager that they delegate the decision-making process to us when we are able to justify that we are capable of performing some specific tasks. Thus, even my manager had almost the same security access as mine.

However, I am not the one to justify whether the way they work is correct but it is sometimes frustrating to wait for someone who works in a different time zone.

Cut the Costs

By centralizing the IT department, one would expect that the costs are mostly focused on the corporate IT and thus decreasing the needs to have more IT personnel to be placed on each site. Centralization would be wise for organizations which are expanding and most of their sites are no more than 500 staffs. Most of the organizations practice is one IT personnel supporting 100 staffs.

Skill Specialization

Highly specialized IT personnel can be recruited for corporate IT instead of recruiting for each and every site. The IT personnel in other sites will be more like jack of all trades where they perform instructions given by the corporate. In addition, the IT department will be more organized as there will be only one final decision made by the corporate IT.

Standard Rules

Different people have different mindset and a lot of times, we want things to be done our way. Organizations often want to control the procedures of handling tasks and it can be achieved through centralization. Needless to say, the set of rules and process handling will come from the corporate IT, in other words, the experts. It is often published as knowledge database for staffs to search.

Securing Data

Data will be more secured as most of the data will be backup from the corporate IT rather than having several loose copies of backup data from each site. Centralizing will ensure that all the data is backup and most of the time, data will also be store off-site.

Productivity

Troubleshooting of problems can be easily solved because most of times, the problems can be elevated to the corporate IT as they might have been enquired before. Decentralization will mean that different IT groups often avoid from contacting other IT groups on problems even though the other IT groups might have similar problems solved before.

Centralization will increase the productivity in a way that every staffs in the organization will be able to connect and login to the server no matter which sites they are. Deployment of software and changes will be instructed by the corporate IT and that will restrain other sites from having older copies of software or data incompatibility.

Verdict

Indeed, centralization works well in my ex-company. Delegation helps them in accomplishing more tasks. Even though it can be frustrating when waiting for someone in different time zone, things can normally be solved within 24 hours. A set of standard rules are equally important to keep all the procedures standard and centralization will avoid each and every site from having their own set of rules.

Decision-making process may be a pain but it will be a decision made in consideration of the whole organization rather than for that one site.

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