When merging different companies, one of the most crucial building blocks of future success is a fully merged and centralized IT Management. Why? Because every attempt I witnessed to try something else created chaos. And that’s something you really don’t want within your IT department.
A small example. One of my customers bought some small companies and integrated them into their Active Directory, leaving every local administrator with a domain administrator account, because that’s what they had before the migration. Sounds fair for the administrators, but a few weeks later some of the mail servers stopped sending email.
Someone made some small changes to the DNS service, which was Active Directory integrated, so this reduced the potential causes to the Domain Admin group members… all 120 of them. At first this doesn’t look like a huge number, but if you consider that every local administrator and at some sites even local support personnel had domain administrator privileges, it is much to great a risk to be left unchanged.
Another small example, at another company. While rolling out a new directory structure and migrating every company site into it, all local administrators where reduced from local Domain Administrators to being Domain Users with delegated privileges. Some of them fought fiercely to regain their old “power” and the CIO was forced by some executives to reinstate them.
The funny thing was one of them sent an email with a question, that most of the central hotline staff could answer, about a problem he had at his site only minutes after the CIO requested to rejoin this particular administrator. The request was cancelled, after we forwarded this email to the CIO.
The main problem when merging IT departments is, that in most cases you don’t know anything about the people and their skills. Even if, in this case, they have been running the local IT at some sites for years this doesn’t mean they know what they are doing.
We all know communication is a crucial part of business success and since IT is a crucial part of today’s businesses it’s even more important to know what is going on in your network, on your servers and who is making changes to what.
That’s why change management was created.
Sending an email with a problem to a distribution list of 40 administrators doesn’t necessary solve a problem. It will more likely produce another: The problem assignment.
This approach has two possible paths of solution.
- Everyone thinks somebody else is already on it and ignores the email
- Two or more Admins will try to solve the same problem at the same time
In most cases none of these paths will solve the original problem, because every change of one admin will lead to inconclusive result for the other, thus resulting in more changes.
Taking some time to think, define and plan how your IT environment should work and how this plan can be realised is the first an one of the more difficult steps, but it in the end it will be worth the effort.