I have been around long enough to view information systems from a bird's eye view and I have come up with five points that any individual or small to medium size business can use to view their IT systems. The five points are designed to be vague and overlap, but if you approach your business through the lens of each point, you will cover everything.
Point 1 - Data
Data is the bread and butter of most companies. Data includes not only Word and Excel files, but storage of that data, sharing it, collaboration (ie: wiki), retrieval of data, backup and the hardware/software that the data resides on.
An example is a typical small business two server setup: one server is the file server and the other server does various things, such as email. Data sits on the first server, you may use BackupExec to backup data, a free wiki to collaborate, share files using Windows network shares, and the operating system is Windows Server 2007. Whatever data's tentacles touch is included in this point.
Point 2 - Messaging
People like to message each other, whether it is email, instant message, wiki post, you name it. Messaging includes anything that is a message; a communication between two people most like a conversation. This can overlap Data's (point 1) wiki.
Point 3 - Applications
Applications include mainly software installed, such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, custom software, SaaS, etc. It can include hardware that does a specific task that could be done by software (ie: those funny boxes that check for spam). Applications can sit in the cloud or on your server or on your desktop.
Point 4 - Security
Most IT professionals approach security based on the software they are using. For example, Windows Server with Active Directory will be good enough for most people. But what about SaaS? This point also involves audits, how to tackle large issues and even not IT items such as locking server rooms. Your stance on security depends on what is being done.
A small marketing consulting company with three employees probably doesn't need to have secure shares and can get away with having the private information on a specific laptop. That laptop can be taken home by the person. That secures the data. Of course, this only works for that particular environment. As the company grows, reevaluate each point and make changes accordingly. No need to spend time and money setting up a three person company as if they were a 50 million dollar company.
Point 5 - Access
There are so many ways to access data. I am typing this on a computer, though I could type it on my blackberry. Accessing data involves the transit method too, such as using streaming versus local, virtualized desktops versus local desktops, or even printing (local versus remote).
Accessing data is usually taken for granted until a problem occurs. I have seen in my experience an entire information system setup only to find out that you can not access the data from laptops securely without changes to the system (which always cost money).
View your company through these five points and you will have a good bird's eye view of your business. This also works for families at home that share data. Being able to show your Aunt pictures via streaming it on a laptop from your beach house would be better than carrying hundreds of gigs of pictures on portable hard drives, but of course you have to prepare for this. Preparing is always better than fixing it later on.
