How to create activity and business plan for IT organisaton in 2011

If you still don't have activity and business plan for 2011, now it is right time to do it. Most common mistake is to try predict future. I mean people start to think what will be in next year. Don't badder with it. Nobody knows.
Your task is to think in two directions:

1. What service or performance you need to improve
2. What new service or feature you need

Visualize perfect situation (as you like to be) at the end of 2011. Write it down on paper. Now think of gap between current situation and targeted situation. Write down tasks what you need to to reach targeted picture. Add resources (people, money, time) to each task. Prioritize and recognize relations between tasks. Add responsible to each task and think of control system (how you will track progress of each task).

And that's it, viola, you have activity and business plan for 2011.
Cheers

Transform your IT organisation into service provider!

Now days IT organization are facing problems with maintenance costs and support costs. Sometimes shareholders are eager and then cost cutting starts. Is there way to survive tough times?
I will offer you idea to transform your IT organization to service provides. Definition of Service provider is :
A service provider is an entity that provides services to other entities. Usually this refers to a business that provides subscription or web service to other businesses or individuals. Examples of these services include Internet access, Mobile phone operator, and web application hosting. The term is more often applied to communication services than to other kinds of service industry.
I know, your first thought will be, that's not me. Think again, think about applications that you are offering now. If you are part of bigger organization (multinational company) for sure there is organization whee e you can offer your service. Or maybe just part of service - like database server, monitoring service or help desk service. If you don't have opportunity to offer it within local organization search local market.After a while, I'm sure you'll find at least one service. Then you are ready for step two.
In this step you should think of three things:

1. Processes
2. Organization
3. Infrastructure

1. Processes - if you grab ITIL or similar best practices, you are immediately in problems. Why? Because there are too many processes and you don't need all of them. Start with what is important for service provides. Incident (to preserve availability) and change (to stabilize systems). Later on develop more processes and don't forget that all processes cost resources (people and money).
2. Organization - you will probably need to setup Help desk. Good tracking of tickets received and control or resolution times are most important for customers.
3. Infrastructure - Check if your infrastructure can expand and what are real performance. Think about open source systems and low cost machines (like x86). Implement visualization.

I wish you all luck - and start earning money!
All comments and suggestiona are wellcome.
Cheers