
Looking for a career challenge? Here are five new job titles cropping up in IT departments across corporate America, as well as a brief job description for each one.
Reporting to the CIO, the information steward is responsible for how information is handled and stored across the company. The information steward determines who has read, write and copy access to information. This person is also in charge of how information is secured, backed up and archived. The position involves compliance with industry-specific regulations, as well as the new e-discovery rules for litigation. In an era of stolen laptops and exposed credit card numbers, the information steward is responsible for keeping the CIO out of the headlines.
The service delivery manager takes all the components of a company’s technology — networking, servers, software and storage — and delivers them to a business unit or a group of users as a service. These managers are responsible for setting prices and defining service-level agreements (SLA) for their services. They need to measure their performance against these SLAs and calm down unhappy customers. This job requires a jack-of-all-trades mentality: A service delivery manager is part project manager, part application developer and part contracting specialist.
The technology-business relationship manager serves two masters: the CIO and the business-unit head. (Sometimes these folks have a desk in both departments to make sure they are working for both teams.) This manager helps the CIO understand the business perspective and serve business customers better, and jazzes up business executives about the capabilities that new technology can bring. Good communications skills and solid relationships throughout the company are key attributes of this manager. Here’s what this position shouldn’t be: a bottleneck.
The biggest change in IT shops in recent years is the rise of outsourcing. IT shops outsourcing domestically or offshore need someone on staff who knows how to manage these relationships. This position is best thought of as vendor management on steroids. An outsourcing relationship manager must hold outsourcing vendors to their agreements and fix problems when they arise. This person has to understand the technology links, communication and workflow between the company and the vendor, as well as how outsourcing affects the company’s overall business processes. Strong diplomatic and negotiating skills are essential.
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NetScout and analyst Jim Metzler have teamed to deliver a series of IT Briefs on Network and Application Performance Management leveraging research from NetScout's nGenius & Sniffer users.
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Metzler on Service Delivery Management
Delivering IT business value by evolving our thinking from managing application performance to focusing on services.
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2009 Handbook of Application Delivery
Successful IT organizations must know how to make the right application delivery decisions in these tough economic times.
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Metzler on the Modern IP Network
Discusses the growing emphasis on network management and the need to implement a holistic view of the end-to-end experience of the user.
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