The Disconnect Between Management and the Value of IT 333
DavidHumus writes "According to a Wall St. Journal article top executives at most companies fail to recognize the value of IT, having a tendency to think of information technology as a basic utility, like plumbing or telephone service. The article lists five primary reasons for 'the wall' between IT and business: 'mind-set differences between management staff and IT staff, language differences, social influences, flaws in IT governance (defined as the specification and control of IT decision rights), and the difficulty of managing rapidly changing technology.' Does this fully explain the extreme lack of understanding of IT at high executive levels? The article is even-handed in apportioning blame but touches on a few good points. In particular, how '[m]ost top executives ... think of IT as an expensive headache that they'd rather not deal with.'"
utilities are important (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this comment shows a failure to recognize the value of basic utilities.
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Re:utilities are important (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes. If you try to "right size" your plumbing infrastructure, you will have to redo it every few years and it will cost you much more in the long run.
Re:utilities are important (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:utilities are important (Score:5, Insightful)
I know of several companies who are going to replace thousands of pounds of functioning servers simply because they've reached the end of their 3year service life. When we stop measuring server lifespans in months and do so instead in decades, we'll have matured as an industry. And then people will understand computers as they understand electricity, telephones and plumbing.
They'll still call a specialist.
Amen! (Score:4, Insightful)
Basic utilities are immensely valuable. Imagine how much less productive your office would be if it didn't have phones, electricity, or indoor plumbing.
The fact that these items cost only a fraction of their contribution doesn't mean the same is true for IT.
The key difference is that most basic utilities are or have historically been regulated and their price set at the cost of production plus a reasonable profit. Where they are not regulated they are theoretically kept reasonable by market pressures or political pressures.
Employment of knowledge-workers on the other hand is different:
Each job is unique. Each worker is unique. Leaving one employer for another you hope will be better takes time and effort, as does "getting rid of" a less productive worker and replacing him with someone you hope will be more productive. For these reasons, if someone's pay, benefits, and working conditions are "close enough" to what both the employer and employee think are fair, the employee probably won't quit and he probably won't be "gotten rid of."
Phones make people productive? O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Phones make people productive? O RLY? (Score:4, Interesting)
Layne
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Personally, one of the most ignorant things I see is people who are in the middle of a conversation with you and just stop (often mid-sentence) to answer the phone, regardless of who's calling. I will very occasionaly do this, but only if it's likely to be an important call, or someone I've been trying to get hold of all day, and will always apologise to t
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or worse, your boss wondering the same thing...
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I work for companies who have almost no in-house IT, and from time to time I am charging more for a few hours of work then what a full-time person would take there as a salary. I do not mean pc service, because that is handled by the local guy who knows windows and pc, but basic setups, web maintena
Re:utilities are important (Score:4, Insightful)
* Yes, there might exist businesses that might benefit significantly from hotter hot water. Please spare me your nerdly nitpicking.
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Yes, TFA's whole point is that IT shouldn't be treated as a utility!
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In any business larger than a small shop there are usually several toilets for capacity and redundancy. One can be down for a long time without an adverse effect, provided that it's properly sealed
Maintaining the pretence of superiority (Score:5, Insightful)
They missed something off the list. One of the biggest, if not the biggest barriers I see is the desperate attempts of managers to pretend they know more than their staff. This is never more apparent than in computers and the painful experiences I have had with managers who have to try and justify a higher salary whilst doing something which, at the end of the day, is less critical to the production of a product or service than the people who are actually developing it, have left me with nothing but pity for those managers. It's a terrible burden to have to try and instruct someone who knows a lot more about how to accomplish something than you do, and it tends to result in interference or denigration. Only a few non-technical managers I have had have had the confidence or humility to just ask me what the best thing they should decide is. And they were the best managers.
Re:Maintaining the pretence of superiority (Score:5, Insightful)
Manager: "Hmm....well, on this decision, I guess I'll have to delegate to you. Now, honestly, what do you think we should do??"
Dev: "Scrap the java codebase and start over from scratch in Ruby on Rails"
Manager: "Hmm...didn't we work on this for 10 years and have millions of lines of code invested, including stuff that we can't readily replace because we're still trying to replace that last senior dev?"
Dev: "Scrap the codebase and start over"
Manager: "Well...ok!"
That wouldn't go too well
Re:Maintaining the pretence of superiority (Score:5, Interesting)
Me: "I have fleshed out our draft spec for the new Web site through a series of phone calls and emails over the last few weeks and the developers say they will be able to meet perhaps 80-90% of what you want by the tight deadline you have set and then they will roll out the remaining features over the next couple of weeks."
Director: "I am really concerned that the developers are so far away in another country"
Me: "Distance is not really a problem these days - and in any case, I have sounded out several of their customers and UK contacts and they have all recommended this team. Overall, they can do the job for a very good fee + offer the after-sales support."
Director: "I will think about it"
Email from Director 3 days later at 8pm one night:
"I have spoken to a friend and he has recommended a local company he knows so I have given them the contract."
So, for 3x the cost and over 8 months late we got a half-assed, closed-sourse site with bits still missing.
Boy do I feel valued round here. Thinking of moving? Funny you should say that...
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"It's not what you know, its who you blow."
Back in the late 90s, I got a nice generic RFP for a website for a local business development group, and spent two solid weeks developing a detailed website development plan, including creating an ad revenue stream and offered it up for free to them. I wanted the contacts from the other businesses and figured that I would get some of those businesses. My bid was the only qualifying bid response to the RFP
Re:Maintaining the pretence of superiority (Score:4, Funny)
It's how much you can swallow.
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Good reasons? (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew one like that. He got fired for not knowing some tech buzz word that I can't even remember myself. Many of those guys are defensive for a reason: maybe because of their own irrational insecurities or maybe they've learned the hard way not to look "stupid".
Let's face it, if you don't know something, many, if not most, IT folks will
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Perhaps, but what you say is the likely outcome of someone being found out as ignorant. When someone actively comes to a programmer and says "I'm considering developing the project like X, do you see any issues with that," then they don't get jumped on, they get a lot of respect. Obviously people skills can ma
Re:Maintaining the pretence of superiority (Score:4, Insightful)
Operation Management Systems (OMS)
and
Business Intelligence or Decision Support Systems. (BI/DSS)
OMS are the mission critical systems which need to run perfectly on time and efficiently. These are the programs that keep the business running smoothly.
BI/DSS are jobs that try to take and represent data so it can be understood clearly without information overload. These systems run with margins of errors based a lot of statistics can be down for a few days or months without effecting daily operations. But their value is giving management and the decision makers information to make good decisions for the future. A silly app that seems to say track marketing calls how much time they take on each call to who. Then could be put into a Data Warehouse linked with the HR systems and Sales and find that some marketing people spend to much time with small customers and less with big customers who can greatly effect their profit and save on marketing costs.
iT departments often have a hard time with BI/DSS because they are loose nebulous systems, that are continually changing and evolving, often run very slowly because they are using loosely tied togeter data, often in bad formats... But they do have a value, many times these values are the difference of surviving and dieing as a company.
So I would take a step back if I were you and try to see what the value of the request. It may not be someone just trying to show that they are HIP with IT, but actually working for getting real value out of their IT
No surpise. (Score:5, Insightful)
To us IT folk, the nonsense might seem clear, but to those who are targeted and easily confused, treading waters softly is really a matter of safety, not ignorance.
"top" execs (Score:3, Informative)
So, we're talking about guys who
-jumped on the latest bandwagon without thinking about the actual usefulness of IT for their business
-or maybe were just afraid to look obsolete
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IT attitudes (Score:5, Insightful)
User Attitudes (Score:5, Insightful)
Employees also tend to blame IT when they got caught browsing porn or running their home business at work.
User: "My computer is broken."
IT: "What's wrong?"
User: "I can't access Myspace"
IT: "That's because we block it."
User: "You suck!"
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They are. Tactical and strategic decisions rely on good information, and that means information technology. Without them, you're deaf, dumb and blind.
When you get down to it, an organization relies on the executive to have a "big picture" view and use that perspective to bring an intelli
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Dealing with customers is easy - they know that you're on a clock, and every minute wasted is THEIR money wasted. As such, most customers don't call unless it's important, and when they call they tend to keep it as short as possible. On site visits happen of course, for larger wor
If only we were treated as well as utilities (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If only we were treated as well as utilities (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If only we were treated as well as utilities (Score:5, Interesting)
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That is the IT Manager's fault. He/She should be selling the value of the department. You don't need to sell upper management the value of a phone, toilet, or lights because they were sold the value when they were kids - at home. However, their home probably did not h
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Sounds like a time for the CEO's blackberry to stop working for a day or two.....especially if it's one where he's out golf---err meeting with his buddies and *their* blackberry's are still working. Don't bring the mail server down completely, because you don't want to hold the company hostage.....but a few hiccups here and there will probably get some money thrown your way.
Layne
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A) The average office building could have the A/C off 65% of every week without affecting perceived quality of service. If IT had those kinds of maintenance windows on an email server I bet you'd never notice the downtime. Even for always-on systems like data-center cooling, the A/C undergoes regular maintenance and downtime, which is why no one installs a data center with a single cooling system.
B) Chiller maintenance is big business and even the techs they actually send
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It's not just management (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who says that you can't simply turn of the services with a cron-script at midnight and turn them back on with another cron script when the day of strike is done? At least, that's how I'd do it.
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Re:It's not just management (Score:5, Interesting)
Because IT can not only allow- but make the customers eager to- enter their own orders- saving you customer service costs and allow you to do the same work with a lot less people.
Because IT can take a 4 week manual process which sometimes completely failed and turn it into a 2-3 day process which is fully accountable.
Because unlike electricity or water, IT changes constantly-- every single day-- and if your company doesn't keep up, the next thing you know you are a year behind your competitors and their costs are 10% lower than yours and you are hemorrhaging customers.
IT is a lump of clay that can be sculpted into anything.
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We recently found out that one of the other non-IT departments basically wrote a "system by spreadsheet" which requires over a dozen people to maintain. Their director is protecting them from being automated by IT because he would lose most of those people. So don't come talking to me about "IT COSTS". I think it is really a battle for headcount among the departments.
The Cost Of IT (Score:3, Insightful)
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IT deptarments only cost money with constant upgrades, in hardware and software. Lighting fixtures have a one time cost, and then a minimal replacement cost.
every 3 years all hardware and so
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An intelligent system is to cascade things...Replace a percentage when you have to, and move the machines you replace down
I guess I'm Lucky (Score:5, Interesting)
The value of IT to most businesses... (Score:2, Insightful)
- it is necessary to the functioning of the business
- unless you are a toilet manufacturer or a landlord, it is NOT part of your central business
- ideally it "just works", allowing you to focus on more important things
- when it doesn't "just work", things start to stink.
The difference is that it is unthinkable that most companies should have a "Chief Plumbing Officer", but the IT world seems to think that they need to be involved at the highest reaches of every compan
Re:The value of IT to most businesses... (Score:5, Insightful)
Plumbing - you do it once, it lasts 25 years if not 50. The only upgrades might be for more efficiently flushing toilets and taps that don't drip. That's the equivalent of putting a 750GB hard drive on an original IBM PC.
IT is an essential part of a modern business, and if it's done wrong the business can go down the drains. Wrong can be getting IT in the way of people's jobs, instead of helping them. Sadly this can't be avoided (e.g., third party clients demanding that you use IT for something that only benefits them whilst being a massive inconvenience for the supplier).
I bet many IT guys would love to get paid at the rates plumbers get paid at though. I don't think they'd like the apprenticeship period though
Re:The value of IT to most businesses... (Score:5, Funny)
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They do if that toilet outage is on an upper floor....
Re:The value of IT to most businesses... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The difference is that it is unthinkable that most companies should have a "Chief Plumbing Officer", but the IT world seems to think that they need to be involved at the highest reaches of every company's management.
The difference is: If the toilets on floor 11 fail (get clogged; whatever), the people on floor 11 can continue to work. If the domain-server for floor 11 fails, the cannot do _anything_ in most businesses. Each _SECOND_ the IT-infrastructure isn't available costs serious money. And you can always let a stranger pee in your toilets, but you should never let a stranger anywhere near the main data-servers...
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The difference is that it is unthinkable that most companies should have a "Chief Plumbing Officer", but the IT world seems to think that they need to be involved at the highest reaches of every company's management.
On the other hand (for most businesses), plumbing is something that you either have or you don't. You need it for your employees to be productive, but getting better toilets probably won't make them more productive.
There's almost always potential for some facet of IT to add new value to a compa
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Dept A wants to be hooked into the city sewage system,
Dept B wants a septic tank because they heard it is cheaper
Dept C wants to connect to the county's sewage system because it is new and therefore has to be the best.
Dept D does not want plumbing at all becaus
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I'd suggest that there are often times that those can be applied to the needs associated with the toilet.
And how does IT view Management? (Score:2)
Re:And how does IT view Management? (Score:5, Insightful)
Viewed as a cost rather than a multiplier (Score:2)
They say... nah, how about $3 mill and $10 million in sales.
And this is for a multi billion dollar corporation.
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They throw away software that has been fixed of all issues and buy packages recommended by salespeople that never works as promised for several years (at which point they throw it out and get new stuff... again!!!) I think that is because the tax laws incent new capital investments over maintaining/upgrading existing software.
I've seen this disconnect (Score:2)
FWIW, I think one of the key outputs of IT Governance implementation is to stamp out this form
My personal experience with my IT staff (Score:3, Insightful)
Typical call to IT here?
"Hi, I need to use X piece of software (which is mainstream and well-known). I can't install it myself because I don't have admin rights, can you install it please?"
"Why do you need it?"
"Well [insert many technical reasons here]"
"Sorry, we can't install software that hasn't been approved."
"How do I get it approved?"
"Well it will have to go before the board, which meets every 6 months or so. And you also have to [insert about 100 roadblocks and obstructionist measures here]."
"Great. Screw it, I'll just work from home again."
If you want to know why your IT department is hated, ask yourself how you treat your customers. Do you treat them as your bosses, or as your enemies?
My own (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in the early 90s when I was a real newbie, I asked an ISP if I needed a special phone line for a SLIP connection. Instead of just saying "No" and being done with it, the guy just kept asking "Why". I was not very technical back then and the internet was extremely new (to the general public) so I wasn't coming up with very good reasons. But still, he kept asking "Why" like some retarded parrot.
Moral of the story is I developed a patient, not condescending, attitude to non-tech peopl
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That is not IT department's fault. (Score:5, Interesting)
IT only allows what other people them is allowed. And normally the people saying the last word are auditors of some kind or another.
But is it really a fault?
You see it as obstructionist, but do you have the legal know how to know if the application you want installed is legitimate? Are you going to vouch for its security? (I have seen badly programmed applications, including FOSS ones, bring down complete networks due toe unintended denial of service attacks. Will you take responsibility it the tool you need does such thing?). WIll you put your hands in fire for your application in regards to viruses, trojans and any other nasties?
The obstructionist attitude has a purpose which is to protect the assets and reputation of your company. If that pisses you off, though.
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If they install something on your computer that leads to a network intrusion and massive down time or data theft, they get shafted not you.
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"we're not in the software business" (Score:2)
The mindset at one place I've worked is that "we're not in the software development business, so we don't want to invest in good software development practices", even though the primary business depended, heart and soul, on very specialized and customized software tools. I can see this kind of thing from a secretarial staffing agency. I can't see this kind of thing from an industrial giant making any sense, but it's really a common attitude. They want to develop tomorrow's products using nothing but COT
On the other side of the wall (Score:5, Funny)
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We dont just think it, we know it!
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What IT are you talking about ? (Score:2)
Disconnect from both sides... (Score:3)
Well, on the other hand (Score:5, Insightful)
On the third hand, IT departments are often not staffed adequately, either in butts in chair or in the quality of the heads over those butts. It seems absurd to think about using IT to achieve breakthroughs in productivity or competitiveness when they seem to spend more time restricting the work that goes through the department than actually getting things done.
The bottom line is that skill is distributed on a normal curve, and the vast majority of people are mediocre. That includes top management; most companies have mediocre leadership. When the leadership of a company is weak, there's not much IT can do to make things better. They really are just a facilities type function.
productivity gains (Score:2)
I think they ignore that at their peril.
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IT should be treated as a utility. (Score:2)
Most CIO's and techies tends to look at a new system and then start figuring out where it fits the organization. Thats completely screwed up and is the biggest reason why so many projects fail. The way it should work is that the people needing a function identify it and then the techies find a way to solve it as good/cheap as possible.
IT is just a utility
Sell Yourself and what you do to other departments (Score:2)
At our company I will repeatedly tell other department heads when we complete a project or as a casual reminder what the man hour savings are.
One of my projects was to automate a certificate system that reduced the average time to process and generate an education certificate. The average time to process a certificate went from 10-15 minutes per to 1 minute per. This saves hundreds of man hours, and subsequently thousands of dollars in labor in that department.
Another of a projects we maintain is the e-comm
It's quite simple, actually (Score:3, Insightful)
IT is not the only department that is misunderstood. For example, Ray Kassar of Atari thought that software programmers were a cost center too, and no different than assembly plant workers. He didn't realize that programmers were vital to how Atari makes money, and thus the best programmers all left Atari and went to start Activision with a business plant o make 3rd party software for Atari.
IT is big PERSONAL revenue source for top execs (Score:2)
There is no disconnect (Score:2)
No, it is a disconnect in three ways (Score:3, Insightful)
When it comes to IT their are THREE parties involved. Those who build it (IT), those who govern it (Management) and those who use it (Employees).
These three groups often have no idea what the other is actually doing.
Have you ever seen one of those programs where the boss of a big company is put to work on the factory floor? They used to be pretty common, was there ever a SINGLE boss, who wasn't shown to be totally clueless about how the actual work was being done?
You think IT is any better? How many people with the best training in IT skills ever bother to go down to the factory floor and SEE the REAL workflow before they implement a system?
You got management trying to make decisions on how to improve a workprocess they don't understand, you got IT trying to implement something that has no basis in reality and employees forced to choose between actually getting the work done and following procedure.
It doesn't suprise me at all that this article doesn't mention the workforce. Management article talking about proper management but ignoring the people who got to do the actuall work, yeah, never seen that before.
Get your hands dirty before you even bother trying to think of implementing IT, FIND out what is REALLY needed. IT can do wonderfull things to be sure, but it needs to fit with what is really going on in your company, not what some manager thinks should be going on.
Make sure your management decisions can be executed, first observe what REALLY goes on, plan your changes, then TRY THEM YOURSELVE, with FULL pressure. If you can't do it, your employees can't do it and what counts isbeing able to do it on the busiest day of the year.
The most perfect example, testing an application with just 3 records in the database for performance. My job was to convert the old data, if I pushed more then ten records in, performance crumbled. Took me MONTHS to confince them that the problem was in the application, not my conversion (for every insert MILLIONS of reads were being done thanks to the most idiotic database design in history (no keys), compounded by some really really bad code). But they TESTED IT and it worked fine. Yah, 3 records and those not even fully fleshed out.
I could rant on for hours about bone-headed mistakes of all kinds, but basically FORCE management to get a clue and the only way to do that is BACK TO THE WORKFLOOR!
99% of IT projects that end up unused or not meeting requirements can simply be explained because they were designed without knowing what the real situation is.
it's geeks vs. results!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that either one is better or doesn't have a place but workers in IT & particularly IT leadership need to start thinking that those business management classes in college are a good idea to at least take & listen in on. You're not going to convince the ones with deep pockets (upper management) to keep you around if you don't show your value up front to them. Sure, their practices may be antiquated but they are time-tested and in their eyes, work.
Geeks are also going to need to realize that not all things are academic, business leaders expect results, not some elegant solution that looks cool in an IDE. There's that classic line from Ghostbusters I remember, "I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there."
Maybe it's not that extreme but that is the truth, like it or not.
Easy solution (Score:2)
The problem is systemic (Score:2)
Problem: Managers See IT as a Cost vs. a Benefit (Score:2)
I can sum it down into language even managers understand, "IT make money go bye-bye." While other departments are seen as money generators for the company, IT is thought of as a cost.
They often don't see the cost/benefit ratio or how IT HELPS them make money, they see it as an expense and a drain on the bottom line. And especially they don't understand that you will have to upgrade the technology from time to time. And when it is upgra
Domain perspective versus IT implementation (Score:2)
For example, very few of the reliability standards talk about the communications and computation that implement what the standard addresses. You have act
I've seen it both ways (Score:4, Insightful)
The people who say IT is mostly support, they have it exactly right. IT is a support function unless the business's main product is IT. Stupid management always devalues the workers, the people who keep the place running. In this regard, IT is not special. Sometimes IT is staffed by arrogant asses who deserve to be mocked, just like you can have rude janitors or marketing weenies. Again, nothing new here.
In a healthy organization, IT's attitude is "How do we make things better?" I'm always the Excel go-to guy since most people don't have the time to learn all the tricks. I'm fine with that. I've got a thousand tricks and most people only need to know a few of them. I set their sheet up the way they need it, they'll learn just the tricks they need and will be happy.
IT is always lacking for resources? Most departments are. My dad worked as a mechanic for the phone company motor pool and he was constantly complaining about how they had to make bricks without straw. Management saw them as nothing more than a cost center, never appreciating the value they provided. They increased the average age of the fleet from 10 to 20 years. Oh, that's great. Yes, you're cutting down on procurement costs but did you notice how maintenance is skyrocketing? No, that chart wasn't in the meeting. That's great.
Good IT makes itself available to the business, makes things run more efficiently and is invaluable. Ask the workers or management what would happen if the IT staff all got hit by a bus. If the response is "Oh my God, we'd be so fucked," that's a good IT department. If they just get this wistful little smile on their faces, that's a bad IT department.
No full-time staff for basic utilities (Score:2)
All these things are installed once, and when you have a problem, you get an electrician or a plumber. This is called outsourcing.
IT the infrastructure is about cabling, PC's and delivered software. No reason why you would not or could not outsource this either. However, from a certain company size you might need someone who is able to design and plan your IT infrastructure and hand this out to a contractor for implementation and maintenance.
Someone should come up with figures how basic IT improves produc
Vendors and Management are the problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
If management had instead gone to IT and said "This is what we need to do" then the real value of IT comes to light as we can work on a solution to that problem, or maybe even give some insight into "Well, with technology, that problem is actually this..let's solve that".
Personal observation evolution of IT over 30 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Then Microsoft became popular as a desktop environment. The low quality of their entire product range combined with very poor documentation caused in most companies one or two people (usually developers who had played with windows in their spare time) to emerge as the unofficial domain experts on solving microsoft-specific issues.
Microsoft very quickly realised this and enocuraged this model as it mitigated the need for them to provide support for their own products. That combined with the fact that Microsoft jumped on the 'professional certification' bandwagon led to them creating hundreds of new IT job titles and certifications for them that until then no-one had ever even heard of before, let alone actually needed. Fast forqward a few years and now most IT-driven companies are working under the illusion that there needs to be masses of IT staff usally with different Microsoft certifications to support a simple computer network, which has become a self-fulfilling prophecy beacuse the office network in most places has been made unnecessarily complex by the same Microsoft-trained IT staff, apparently partly as job-preservation and partly to get around the technical shortcomings of Microsoft operating systems and products. now many IT departments have transitioned to an incorrect yet frequently-encounterd mentality that they now believe that their role is to be gatekeepers rather than just to provide a service to the people in comapnies that actually make the companies product or service.
My point is, that given the above, I think that if anything, management generally massively overvalue IT departments.
I've seen in most companies that the IT dept get larger budgets than entire production departments, IT employees usually get top-end PC's with widescreen monitors etc. to answer their emails on while developers and engineers, the guys actually making the product, are struggling to compile code bases on hand-me-down hardware.
Re:Personal observation evolution of IT over 30 ye (Score:3, Interesting)
Unix became enormously popular at a time when networked computer hardware was reliable and readily available, but still quite expensive. Software licenses for these systems were comparably expensive. Those economics allowed organizations to justify hiring highly competent staff in order to maximize return on inv
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Without us the stars don't shine and the show doesn't go on. Very rarely do you get a producer or director who recognizes the work of the set designers or prop handlers but they're just as needed as the people on stage who bring the people into the theater.
I know, it's not a Car analogy... Maybe we're the pit crew for the race cars of the business world?
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Just joking, but that is the way most feel about IT staff.
Exactly. (Score:2)