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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.
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 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 :)
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???"
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.
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
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
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.
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