Justifications For Creating an IT Department?

jjoelc writes "This may sound like an odd request, so first some background. I work at a broadcast television station, and I have found it to be very common for IT to be lumped in with the engineering department at many stations. I believe this is mainly because the engineers were the first people in the business to have and use computers in any real capacity, and as the industry moved to file-based workflows it has simply stayed that way. I believe there is a need for IT to be its own department with its own goals, budgets, etc. But I am having a bit of a rough time putting together the official proposal to justify this change, likely because it seems so obviously the way it should be and is done everywhere else. So I am asking for some pointers on the best ways to present this idea to a general manager. What are the business justifications for having a standalone IT department in a small business? How would you go about convincing upper management of those needs? There are approximately 100 employees at the station I am currently at, but we do own another 4 stations in two states (each of these other stations are in the 75-100 employee range). The long term goal would be to have a unified IT department across all 5 stations."

Comments

So let me get this right

[InterestingFella]

You believe there is a need for IT department, but even you have rough time determining what that need would be. If you cannot think of a reason yourself, why are you suggesting it to begin with?

Re:So let me get this right

[Anonymous Coward]

The OP seemed a bit ambiguous with the "'likely because it seems so obviously the way it should be and is done everywhere else.", but I am going to take it to mean that it's fairly obvious that they should be separated because they do in fact have separate goals, agendas, etc.... but what's a good business-speak way to make the case?

Re:So let me get this right

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he's talking about business justification, ROI, etc. Here are a few ideas:

1) uniformity and consistency across all 5 stations (reduced downtime and troubleshooting)
2) tighter controls/policies minimize security risks
3) faster turnaround on issue resolution (engineers aren't busy with other tasks)

Re:So let me get this right

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reasons that make it happen is: An IT department will save us money in the following ways: x, y, z.

You know your business and issues, so you have to fill in x, y, and z. Classic examples are reduced downtime, standard equipment and software purchases, consistent backups, someone to provide troubleshooting and training, documentation on the environment, and the ability to prevent the next IT trainwreck.

Re:So let me get this right

[Anonymous Coward]

We did that in our organization. Then we fired them all and outsourced our IT.

Re:So let me get this right

[sheehaje]

Not sure what the business speak is, but the primary points to get across are:

An IT Department will evaluate needs of the other departments and determine ways computers can streamline day to day functions, primarily by automating current manual processes

An IT Department will help build computer usage policies that keep employees productive and the data systems reasonably secure

An IT Department will help determine systems to expand service to the customer base. i.e. web applications

An IT Department will recommend avenues to promote the company online to the marketing department

These are all things that IT people do that the Engineer department doesn't need to get their hands in. Honestly, most IT departments split time between engineering like functions (Network design and implementation), business analysis (Finance, Personnel systems, etc) , and marketing (online presence). When IT is gets lumped into one of those departments instead of being it's own entity, usually it takes on the persona of that departments function. When I first started in my job (back in 1997), IT was part of the finance department. We relied heavily on consultants for network, security, etc., and were mostly comprised of programmers. Our main function was to help finance with spreadsheets, and write time and attendance systems, and other financial tools.

We are now a fully functioning IT Department, with our own hierarchy. We do all the network implementation, pc support, server implementation. We have a few programmers who still do business analysis and programming for the different departments (not just finance). We also maintain a disaster recovery site, and have invested heavily in virtualization on both the server and desktop side. Things we would've never been able to do if we were still under finance. In the end, our whole IT department is about 1.5% of the total budget. That seems low, but our budget is around 300 million a year and about every 4 or 5 years, we can infuse more capital into the budget if our projects warrant it. We also charge back to the other departments as we are a shared service. It all needs to be analysed to determine if a business is large enough to warrant a separate IT department.

Re:So let me get this right

[Sitrix]

I knew a company that did just that... Outsourced company milked that company for money for a few years, while making short term decisions (often bad ones). Then, one day things started to break constantly and consultant was hired to locate source of the problems. Later, that IT was brought back "in house" to avoid making messes like that in the future. People that work under same roof as your company, tend to care a little more about your operations. This is just one example out of many, where short term thinking of cutting IT spending ended up costing company a lot more in a long run.

Re:So let me get this right

[Spazmania]

Many of these are all things an IT department does BADLY.

a. It is NOT the job of the IT department to streamline the business. It is the job of the IT department to facilitate computing resources for other groups within the business who find it worthwhile to streamline using computers.

b. It is NOT the job of the IT department to keep employees productive. Nor is anyone in the IT department qualified to make decisions about employee productivity outside of the department.

c. It is not the job of the IT department to set information security policy. It is the job of the IT department to educate the other groups within the business as to the security impact of candidate business choices, enforce the information security policies those educated groups ultimately select and architect the system so that divergent security policies between the groups can not damage each other.

d. It is not the job of the IT department to market the organization online. In a successful organization, the online marketing professionals sit in the marketing group. It is the IT department's job to provide computing resources, to help vet prospective vendors and, on occasion, to warn the marketing group away from kinds of computing use that could be considered unethical.

The engineering department at a TV station *IS* an IT department. They manage the electronic equipment and the maintenance of the equipment which facilitates the business. Under no circumstances should an IT department stand alone from the engineering department; IT operations is unambiguously subservient to the overall "engineering" effort.

The primary justification...

[forkfail]

... is the sweet, sweet rage it will engender when your future IT techs tell folks that they can't use their iPhones and the editor of their choice for undisclosed security reasons. Ah, I can feel the little bits of evil already spreading, ruining people's days, causing them to hate their neighbor, kick their dog and neglect their children, leading their neighbor to flip off an old lady, the dog to bite the postman, and the kids to grow up to drug addicts.

Bwahahaha! Screwtape, you ain't got not nothin' on IT!

Define your "need"

[Count Fenring]

This may be a bit naive, but maybe the fact that you're searching for justifications is a sign that you're not quite approaching this the right way. Maybe look at it this way - what is the need that this is addressing, the problem it would solve, the advantage it would give. You say that you believe that there's a need for IT to be its own department - why? Define that need clearly, then start working on the proposal from that.

Also, I'd give a strong thought to the relative advantages and disadvantages of the current system - it's easy to just disregard "the way things have always been done" as valueless, but processes evolve for reasons, and to at least a minimum level of functionality. Any change you propose needs to have clear, concrete, and valuable advantages over the existing process.

Counterproductive IMO

[kf4lhp]

As background, I worked in an engineering department of a TV station for a while, and with the way things are going, engineering and IT are becoming far more intertwined and co-dependent on each other. Splitting them apart would, I think, be counterproductive - you'd end up with IT wanting to do their own thing and engineering being unable to make it work with their side of the house.

Having dedicated IT people and dedicated engineering people is a great idea, but they need a single leader to keep everyone pulling in the same direction (and some cross-training helps too).

Re:Counterproductive IMO

[sunderland56]

Things like the microwave in your example must by FCC regulations be maintained by a licensed engineer.

If you have a rack of 10 servers, where 9 of them are broadcast equipment that serve shows and commercials on-air, and one is the company mail/web/etc. server, why would you administer the two in two separate departments? Broadcast engineering these days is IT, to a very large extent - except that they are IT people with licenses and knowledge of RF and FCC laws and regulations. Creating a separate department to run the mail server is just silly.

Re:Counterproductive IMO

[Opportunist]

I'm in an IT-Security department of a pretty large company, vice-CSO. Our department got the inofficial name "cover-your-ass-dept". Why? Because that's ALL we actually do. I try hard (honestly, no kidding) to make it more than that, actually giving people answers when they ask instead of just drowning them in "shut the fuck up" papers (called that way because they consist of strategy papers, position papers and job instructions, each about 500 pages of very IT-Legalese heavy text, intended not to be read but to shut the person asking up in a neat and simple way, telling them to RTFM. It's like the bible, ya know, whatever they're asking for, it's in there. Somewhere. Most likely in more than one spot. Most likely contradicting itself).

The reason is quite simple. When the shit hits the fan (not if. Please. No company with more than 100 employees is tightly secure, you can't tell me that. If you want to, I'll be there for an audit. I'm actually quite affordable, I do it more for fun than profit...), everyone start pummeling the IT-SEC department, and then you better have a cover-your-ass paper handy to show them that THEY fucked up. Else, someone gets fired. That cover-your-ass paper is usually one or more of those 500ish page heavy documents nobody ever reads. The usual course of action is like this, you could pretty much script it.

1. Shit hits fan
2. IT-SEC gets flak
3. IT-SEC collectively disappears between thousands of sheets of paper in desperate search of "but we told you this could happen if you don't...".
4. IT-SEC finds said "but we told you so" and presents it.
5. Nobody gets fired because IT-SEC did their job (yeah, right) and the poor sod who fucked up couldn't have known it better 'cause he's no IT-SEC.

That's pretty much what IT-SEC is like in some companies. And that's what is actually wrong with it. So you shouldn't have an IT-SEC department. You don't need one! Hire some IT-SEC guru by the hour, have him design your company security policy (we usually have templates ready, just needs a bit of adjustment and you're good to go), and have him come in for a checkup every couple month, maybe 2-3 times a year. That's enough. And plenty cheaper than having a guy sitting around doing nothing but covering his ass.

Justifying a need or a want?

[pryoplasm]

If it seems like the engineers of the station can handle it, what exactly are you looking to get out of a standalone IT department? They can be useful if the engineers are overworked, but really you should not try to shoehorn an IT department if it isn't needed.

Do you use Avid or another computer based editor there? Perhaps what the engineers are doing for their role along with IT isn't too much of a burden, or might be a way to clear their mind and work on something simpler.

My first reccomendation would be to check in with the engineers you want to "help". Second would be to check with whoever does budgets or accounting to see if there is any room for it...

Why change?

[LWATCDR]

Frankly engineering sounds like the right place for it. if you create an IT department then you will probably be pushed more under the business unit and that could be really bad.
You will go from "we need this to keep running" to "how will this expense increase profits".
Of course the real reason for this push maybe that the Author wants to move up and become a "department" head.

An IT dept. with its own goals?!?

[rbrander]

This already sounds bad to me before it starts. IT departments shouldn't have their own goals any more than the Finance dept. should have their own, or the HR department. All of these are "internal service departments" - they do nothing directly for the corporation, as such, they only do so indirectly by providing internal services to the staff.

You may notice the odd phenomenon already happening in this slashdot topic, of a bunch of IT geeks making fun of, and heaping criticism on, IT departments. That's because internal service departments are almost completely incapable of distinguishing when they are serving the larger corporate need, and just serving themselves.

I have yet to find the IT department that did an honest and humble cost-benefit analysis or risk assessment, one that came up with the conclusion, of, say, (to pick a currently raging topic as an example) "Yeah, allowing people to use Smart Phones at will is going to cause us a lot of pain, but that pain is small compared to the good it will do for everybody else, so I guess we have to suck this one up for the team".

Never.

The whole last 30 years since the PC came in (indeed, one could go back to DEC "minicomputers" and "departmental computing") has been one of steady spread and democratization of IT tools. "IT people" (that would be us, the /. crowd) have jumped on this cultural shift with enthusiasm and indeed evangelism. But IT *departments* have always stood in the way, holding it back, demanding to control it all. They assert the larger good, but never do that cost/benefit figure, never do a post-analysis of productivity "improvements" after they took over something that was not formerly under their control, and cost them quite a lot of money to manage.

So get a security guy if the corporation can afford one and needs one. Get a central IT purchasing and contract-management guy, if that is cost-justified. Get IT-type staff, each as needed. But split them up, don't let them become their own department. Absolutely not one with their own goals.

Clear reasons that he doesn't wish discussed

[gsslay]

I think the OP is quite clear why he wants a separate IT department. He doesn't say, but I wouldn't be exactly staggered if it turns out that he is in charge of IT. Having a separate IT department would give him his own budget, and get the Head of Engineering off his back.

The OP therefore wishes a separate IT department for his own benefit. This may be as good a reason as any, but not one that's likely to cut it with the company. Particularly not the Head of Engineering. So he wants us to invent some plausible sounding reasons that he can sell to the company.

Here's hoping the company don't read slashdot.