Technical staff are intelligent people, and there's rarely something you can't explain to them, believes Ken Payne, national IT director at Australian law firm Deacons.
"Managing occurs by communication, and by trusting each other and working with each other," Payne said. "Listen to what [your] managers have to say, and balance it off and be devil's advocate at times."
He believes that there's a lot of discussion and thought amongst IT professionals, and often solving technical problems can be a matter of sitting down and talking about what the business is trying to achieve.
Payne has been with Deacons for eight years--four as IT manager in Hong Kong before becoming national IT director in Australia.
In his current role, he has four IT line managers reporting to him who handle areas such as operations, networking and software development, support, the service desk, as well as databases, intranets, extranets and the delivery of software systems to the firm's staff and clients. The firm's law division has 25 IT staff in total, supporting more than 1100 internal clients.
A core requirement for the firm are for core applications to be available 24x7, explains Payne. He describes the firm as the IT division's "client", with service level agreements (SLAs) in place to ensure the required uptime is achieved.
A core focus for Payne in his role is also strategy. "I oversee what the line managers do, and the direction the firm is heading," he said. "I look for areas of new IT [technologies] that come on line and look at the future of how we're going to get there over a two, three and four year period."
He believes that you've got to have a good working relationship and trust your team to be able to solve problems which crop up. Although much of his role is no longer hands-on, Payne said that he attends course and reads a lot to keep up to date technically.
"I've had a lot of [technical] experience in the past--that has always helped," he said. "As long as you've got an understanding of what [team members] are trying to achieve then you can succeed in managing them."
Areas of technology Payne is keeping an eye on at the moment include wireless, and hand-in-hand with that security. "I'm keeping an eye on the concept and the development," he said. "[But] a large corporate with wireless can't afford to lower its security standards."
Voice over IP and data storage, such as storage area networks, were other technologies Payne has been assessing.
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