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Where Does IT Fall Within Your Organization?
ros256 writes "I help out a relatively small (100 employees) medical device company that does not have a dedicated IT department. Instead the network admin reports to a manager in the Clinical department. Although this seems unusual to me, the organization isn't really structured at this point to have IT staff report to a department more relevant to the work they do. I've been giving thought as to where within the organization would make more sense. So, I pose this question to the Slashdot community: Where does IT fall within the organizations you work with?"
since I work at a top-10 Fortune 500 company, IT is it's own dept. We do report up through the same executive structure as Accounting, Travel, etc. based on geography and who's located here vs. at HQ in another state.
I am at a university, and the computer science department has 5 IT staffers who simply report to the central IT office for the entire campus. Most of the large departments in science and engineering have one or two IT staffers who serve a similar role, but since CS has somewhat heavier computing needs, we are assigned extra people. Basically, the department's IT staff serve as points of contact: they do what is in their power when they can, or if they cannot, they forward the request up to the appropriate person. For example, when I received my new workstation, a university-wide asset number had to be assigned to it, and the CS department firewall had to be configured to allow SSH traffic to the machine; the IT staff forwarded the asset number request to the central office, and took care of the DNS entry themselves.
Palm trees and 8
IT infrastructure should be handled by an IT department (network, server & storage support, basic desktop supply and support) but it should NOT handle such things as database development and management, application development, etc.
Unfortunately, many companies class anything to do with a computer as "IT" and treat a DBA the way they treat a desktop support flunky. Many times I have worked for organizations that decided to grab every departmental programmer or DBA and bring him/her into the IT department, to the severe detriment of the department he/she used to support.
At one company I worked for they outsourced all the IT and made the programmers, DBAs, developers, etc. go work for the contractor. Lots of them quit and went to better jobs, so the contractor brought in many of their folks from India to fill the open positions. It was a disaster. Eventually most of the departments hired developers, DBA's, programmers, etc. of their own and just gave them all generic "Engineer" titles.
In modern American businesses, everything's a "cost center" except sales and top management itself. This specifically includes not only IT but product development. Thus, sales is the darling of the execs and everyone else gets the shaft.