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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?"
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.
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.
the same people that keep the lightbulbs changed, the warehouse shipping and the driveway plowed.
That makes sense, assuming "setting an employee up with a computer" to be comparable to "setting employee up with a desk". I've seen some companies where IT operates under the Finance department. I've never really understood why, except maybe because early computer use in many companies was limited to accounting, and it stuck in Finance for legacy reasons. I've seen other companies where there's a dedicated IT department that traces up to the CIO, and it kind of runs independently.
I think it depends on the company, but a lot of companies miss out by failing to integrate IT very well. They treat the IT support guy like a handy-man who is completely divorced from the company's strategy, and meanwhile the entire business is running on computers. Not that I object to the comparison between support personnel and a handy-man, but if the productivity of your company depends of effective and efficient use of computers, then you might want to involve some people in your strategic decision-making who understand computers really really well. I've seen companies ask employees to spend hours going through a process that a computer could automatically complete in minutes, just because they never bothered to ask the IT guy if there was a better way to go about things.
It has been structurally different in every company I've been in. Especially smaller ones. Sometimes IT reports to the CFO to keep costs in check. Sometimes to COO to get business processes automated and computerized. And if you're lucky you have a CTO who reports to the CEO/board but is free to make decisions.
Most companies view IT as pure overhead and try to micromanage it's budget out of fear of excess spending. I can't blame them. Once upon a time all you paid for was an office and some basic office supplies. Now your yearly software license costs alone rival your rent.
A better motivation would be to stick close to their IT department to make sure both sides understand what the businesses goals and visions are.
"We want to mobilize out sales force"
"We want a stronger web presence"
"We want ensure 24/7 up time even in the case of a disaster"
"We want to make X process and Y process work together more seemlessly using available technology"
Getting lost in small details or second guessing the decisions of the IT people you pay to make IT decisions for you ends up hurting businesses. Like "Hey! Stop buying $100 antivirus software buy $19.99 ones!" If IT has to waste time cleaning viruses and reformating machines then they have no time to plan for future growth or to research solutions to real business problems. It stifles growth and wastes money in other areas.
That's the way our company works.
They don't want to involve IT because we ask to many hard questions like:
"Who's going to use the system?"
"Do we want to put that promotion on the web site or just in the news paper?"
"Do we want to track our click through rate?"
"Is there power and network available in that spot?" "
You know, stuff that everyone else just doesn't understand.