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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?"
A few places I've worked IT fell under Operations, the same people that keep the lightbulbs changed, the warehouse shipping and the driveway plowed.
Presently I work at a smaller business, where I represent the department. I'm lateral to Operations Director, sales director, etc and report directly to the President and VP.
I recommend reading The Geek Gap. It might give you some further insight into the topic (and, if nothing else, it might help your boss and their boss understand the importance of a proper department).
I also would recommend anyone in an IT or management position to read that book. It's a great read that can be finished over a weekend.
Living With a Nerd
Hopefully not to far, servers don't handle drops well. Keyboards seem to do alright though.
In my organization, it essentially stands for "Incompetent Technician"
I'm also in a smaller IT company (~140 ppl). We have a department of 6 and fall under the Operations area. When we were smaller, it was a wandering soul of a department, but now that we have an IT manager who really knows his stuff, it's great.
Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.
This group also includes HR, training, health & safety, legal counsel... All the "overhead" stuff we don't sell directly to clients (we are an engineering & construction company).
India
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
I started with a small Medical Contract Research Organization right out of college (25 people) as the first IT person. At that point, I was a member of the data management department, but I think it more importantly depends on the people you have. If you don't have a dedicated IT department, the best idea is to see who has the most knowledge and more importantly, who WANTS to do it. In my case, the head of DM had the most knowledge and had been doing it up until they hired me. In your case, if the head of Clinical has knowledge and wants to do it, they are probably the best choice.
In most case something like Data Management or Stats or something along those lines will be best, since those people are usually a little more tech savvy. But if they don't want to do it, then it doesn't matter how tech savvy they are, IT isn't going to get anything from them.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I was the sole system administrator for a finance software development department in a big company, and reported directly to the manager of the finance team. She wasn't a technical person, and had an home office 1,500 miles away. Amusingly, I NEVER saw her in person for the 18 months that I worked for her.
The good thing about working for her is that she didn't understand what I did, and didn't particularly care to learn. She didn't bother asking questions as to what I was up to, just assumed that I was doing a good job, and gave me great reviews every year. The flip side of that is that she didn't understand why we needed things like new equipment, new software, or training... which left me running the entire development department on 6 year old refurbished equipment that I could "borrow" from other departments.
That said, it was a good time. I thought myself a lot of useful skills during my downtime, which made me a better sysadmin later on. I wish that I had more managers like that now :)
I work in a similar sized company that manufactures kitchen and bath counter tops and has retail kitchen and bath design showrooms. I'm the only IT worker there, and I work there part time. Well, part time is kind of a misnomer, I work there whenever there is a problem, or whenever I want. That being said, I work about 20 - 30 hours a week on average. I'm responsible for about 45 desktops and 3 servers spread out over 7 locations. We have 3 owners of the company who are the CEO, CFO, and President. My boss is the controller and he works under CFO. Basically the only time I have to go to my boss is when I want to make a company wide policy change, or if I need some money to order parts.
TL~DR Your boss should be someone with purchasing authority.
When shit works right - "Why do we need an IT department? They're just an expense!"
When shit breaks - "Why the hell are you using shit that has to be kept together with duct tape and bailing wire???"
...All over the place.
Although I understand the historical reasons why IT was frequently placed under finance, the world has changed. In ancient times, IT was centralized and capital-intensive. I worked in a state agency that had about $3 million worth of mainframe hardware in a big room. The users had terminals. I was spending between $500,000 and $1,000,000 on capital expense per year. Salaries in IT were rather high as well; even an entry-level programmer was well-paid compared to the rest of the organization. Since the goal of IT was to promote efficiency, you needed the involvement of finance to make sure that the cost of IT was justified.
In the modern world, IT is decentralized. If you think about the cost per employee, capital expense is a fraction of what once was. Half of the IT employees make less than an executive secretary. Although the official goal of IT is still to promote efficiency, the reality is that most projects are mandated by some type of policy compliance or to keep pace with competitors. Not much of this is truly discretionary. The linkage of IT to finance has (in my opinion) outlived its usefulness. I have seen too many dumb ideas leak from finance into IT.
In my 400 person US based non-profit, the Director of IT reports to the CFO. It actually works quite well as they have to work together on most of the strategic planning initiatives.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
When I worked at Freescale, there actually was no real IT department there: it was outsourced to an Indian company. They got paid based on the number of tickets resolved, so they were always trying to make up more work for themselves to do, such as creating tickets to set up IM on an employee's computer, or various other trivial tasks.
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.
Allow me to speak in generalities, and feel free to not bombard me with one off "nuhhhh-uhhhs." Unfortunately IT is becoming more and more like plumbing or electricity. Argue all you want, but when your CEO see's your CIO (our whatever acronyms equate) walking into his office he can almost always be sure that the conversation about to occur will (a) not make the company any money or (b) cost the company some amount of money. Years of untalented managers have allowed IT to become a cost center / black hole. You don't have to agree, in fact I encourage you to continue riding your unicorns at LARP conventions. Regardless, your managers have failed your chosen discipline. The technical skills that get you promoted into upper management aren't really the skills you need to be successful, or make your company successful. This is why CIO's are always going to be second string to sales, marketing, and finance leaders. Sorry, I don't make the rules. -d
Sounds like a company fit to be in an Apple commercial. Back in the real world, there are a lot of companies that can't unbox the computer in front of the employee, let them set their own password and then get busily to work. Having worked for a lot of these places, I can say that very little time is spent on OS related tasks (that magically are "better" on a Mac). Niche third party apps (or worse, home grown apps) that are business critical can quickly monopolize time in rollout, maintenance, and user training. Macs are not special when it comes to this; you just happen to work at a place that uses computers casually enough that basic software fits your needs. Good for you.
-or-
When shit works right despite being underfunded: "Why are we paying so much for the IT department? They're just an enormous expense, but there's no benefit because everything is working anyway!"
When shit breaks because of being underfunded, "Why are we paying so much for the IT department? They're just an enormous expense, but there's no benefit because they can't keep anything working!"
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.
Users are pretty much self sufficient on Macs. End of story.
Speaking as a man who once had the misfortune of supporting Macs, I can assure you this is not true at all. It may be true for the specific people you have in your organization, but that's about it. Dumb users are dumb and require hand-holding and fixing, no matter what platform you stick them on.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Somewhat similar situation here, only I report to the CEO. Then again, so does just about everyone else, so there you go. I think a lot of it depends on how much the person in charge likes to delegate.
I worked for a non profit company with about 200 people, and there were like 5 divisions, Sales and service, Accounting, Publishing, Marketing, and Operations. IT fell under operations. Operations included things like janitorial services, the guys who managed the HVAC, etc. IT was considered a tool to maintain the business flow, and it actually was a very well thought out department; it seemed to fit just right. I was brought in to assist with the first attempt at a "rolling update" of all the machines in the building from old Win 3.1 boxes to Windows NT, and while I was there we started implementing the first help desk to manage the questions coming in from the new hardware. It was a well oiled machine, and we understood we were exactly that, people who knew our IT infrastructure was simply a machine that needed to be oiled and maintained regularly. You may turn your nose up to the idea that IT belongs under someone who manages the guys who make sure the Air Conditioning works, but in fact that's what we did, and what a lot of IT departments do, or should do.
IT had three teams, desktop, network, and development. Each was headed by a different manager. A previous post mentioned how IT often cannabalized development, but IT managed development can work fine as long as it's separate from the rest of the IT team and dedicated to it's task. Also the company has to be sufficiently large enough to warrant it. This was a nonprofit publishing company. For your medical device company it depends on what they use IT for. If you basically buy and sell, if you need a development team to manage your sales tools, then they can be in IT and be responsible for these types of programs, but make sure they also are accessible to the people who need them. IT can easily get Aloof and think they don't have to help people who don't do things exactly the way they want, and thus can't get work done.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'd love to see the Macs setting up the redundant T-1s in the comm room, configuring ideal BGP route advertisements, and monitoring the connection.
And how good are Macs at writing custom programs? If you aren't wasting tons of time because routine tasks just aren't optimized as much as they could be on-site, you must not be doing much of anything on those computers.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I've actually had people reviewing the books say to me that the IT department doesn't bring in any money, so we were therefore worthless. IT is just a black hole, where money goes in, but nothing productive comes out.
I accept their opinion as truth. Then I volunteer to have the IT staff take a month off with no pay, and not be available by pager and phone regardless of how big the emergency is. Their tone changes quickly.
"But what if something goes down?"
"Nope, we don't do anything"
"What if the network breaks?"
"Sounds like a problem for the people who are worth something."
"You can't do that!"
"We could, and there are people who recognize the value of a good IT department who would hire them before the end of the first week off."
Mind you, that was before the recession hit hard. Those who are still working are happy that they have jobs, even if it's at a fraction of what they used to make. I've gotten a few crying phone calls asking me to fix something, but they rarely offer enough to cover the gas money to get to their site and back. If I happen to be in their area, I'll stop by and fix it. I'm not going to lose what little money I have left, just to fix their problems. My favorite whine is "We're losing $x,xxx every hour!". If it's that important, why can't they pay a reasonable rate for me to fix it. I'm not going to spend $20 in gas and an hour of my time, to get paid $15, regardless if they think it's fair.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If IT is seen as a cost then it will be spun off into a separate IT organization and basically be the same as any other service; water, power, phone, light etc. You'll get a PC and email. The IT org will spend years on each "big project" which will come in late, over budget and will only partially fulfill requirements which changed years ago. Apart from a "Service Desk" and a small core of centralized support staff who spend their time firefighting, users will be left to fend for themselves. This is pretty normal and is cheaper than the alternative.
If IT is seen as a benefit then the IT components will be integrated directly into the rest of the business. You get a PC, email, office automation, custom apps, etc. There will be local support and development staff who can respond quickly to both business needs and problems. This is rare because it's seen as significantly more expensive than the standard model, though it can deliver huge productivity improvements to businesses. However, in this model, IT costs are rather difficult to quantify so I haven't seen evidence of how much more expensive it is.
Now, you pay your money and take your choice. Quality vs cost; the same old question. But if all you buy is McDonalds, quit bitching about getting fat. BTW, if you take a look at the org chart in your company you'll see how things are going. For people in the IT business, and that probably covers just about everyone on /. the latter model is infinitely preferable to the former.
Deleted
The problem with all this is that IT Operations (first group) are filled with folks who are seen and treated as a cost, thus the organization and people tend to be maintenance oriented and risk-averse (they don't get rewarded for "new thinking"). The 2nd group tends to be so focused on software that only few capable individuals know enough about systems to be able to even speak IT Ops-speak.
The ultimate issue is that it's VERY difficult to find someone who can do all of what it takes to encompass the facilities and innovation aspects of these two teams, so they're split up into two groups, and that split is reinforced by social dynamics.
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