Free Essay: IT Support for Virtual Teams

The creation of virtual teams is commonly being adopted across global organizations. However, the major concern is whether it is effective. The issue of effectiveness has been constantly being questioned across the business. Virtual teams are created within organizations to serve different purposes, such as virtual training, customer services, and in some cases, for IT support. Despite using virtual teams for global support, there is a need to locate the key challenges and common issues that are encountered while implementing virtual teams within an organization and how they can be improved or solved to achieve maximum results.

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IT Department Issues

When the IT department is using virtual teams to execute its operations, there are high chances of experiencing issues. Some of the most common challenges the IT department is likely to face include:

Communication barriers – when team members within the IT department are currently working remotely, they may fail to abide by the set rules and guidelines and instead take matters into their own hands. Issues related to communication cause supervision challenges for the IT department. Members are constrained as they would be in an office.

Troubleshooting – when working with employees in a virtual team within an organization, troubleshooting might be hard. The IT department will be required to hire people who are well-equipped to handle multiple operating systems.

Remote Access to the system – in case a team’s member computer gets an issue within their computer system and at the same time is depended on the whole IT team, an issue may arise due to difficulties involved in having closed ports.

System updates – In case the IT department wants to run a system update, the employees or the team members may not realize the update hence data integrity challenges. Some of the updates being carried out may call for automation, hence a completely new set of problems arising to the rest of the team since they are unable to surf information normally.

The IT department usually keeps security-critical information within an organization. In case there is a data breach in one of the team members, the whole system gets compromised. If an employee’s laptop gets lost, sensitive information gets exposed to external threats hence raising fear to the entire organization.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Working with virtual teams is usually associated with certain defined advantages that an organization is likely to consider as explained below:

Hiring the right people for the job – virtual teams comprised of individuals located in different geographical locations. An IT department is likely to hire people with the right skills for the job by considering the available job application pool.

Communication. It is a crucial aspect of an organization. Communication is essential as a company could lose millions of profits when the team does not have an application for effective communication, which is if the virtual team lives in different time zones.

Comfortability. Using virtual teams could lead the members to get uncomfortable, which might result in laziness in accomplishing their responsibilities. Productivity is threatened.

Challenges Imposed

IS/IT national standards apply and support both small and large technologies as they emphasize on creating and promoting equitable standards. Organizations deal with issues oriented to sophisticated capabilities, data integrity, confidentiality, accountability, and overall security. To resolve these challenges, organizations must refer to NIST (No Author, 1). It is because NIST would help create policies that are suitable to curb the problems.

Challenges to an organization keep on revolving. Protocols have to be updated to handle and resolve whenever problems arise by referring to the policies of an organization. Violating a protocol such as sharing discrete information would be resolved by terminating the employee’s contract.

In every virtual team, procedures are vital. In most cases, virtual teams succumb to challenges associated with communication. Thus, a team should have a contingency procedure for resolving the problem effectively. It is a procedure that requires everyone in the organization to understand the steps to be followed since an emergency could arise.

Compare and Contrast

Traditional and virtual teams are different in terms of communication technology used and team diversity. A virtual team could exist in various places; hence it requires numerous ways of communication. Traditional teams need only one way to communicate. Most of the information is shared via the internet in virtual teams. Technology plays a significant portion of virtual teams. Traditional teams do not entirely rely on the internet and technology. While traditional teams succumb to fewer conflicts, virtual ones have more significant conflicts (Hobman, 2). Teams are handled effectively via holding meetings. It is simple to hold meetings in traditional teams and a challenge to hold meetings in virtual teams. Therefore, leadership is the other issue that arises when conventional and virtual teams are compared (Yukl, 3).

Conclusion

In conclusion, I examined five issues that are likely to be faced by the IT department in the event of ensuring that the virtual teams run smoothly. I have also tackled five disadvantages and advantages of using virtual teams. There are also challenges enforced by IT/IS national standards, challenges imposed by protocols, and the ones imposed by procedures on virtual teams alongside the proposition on how to resolve them. Lastly, I made a comparison of both traditional and virtual teams concerning team diversity, communication, and technology use.