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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.
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.