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

Re:So let me get this right

[rtfa-troll]

it's fairly obvious that they should be separated because they do in fact have separate goals, agendas, etc....

And this is exactly why you shouldn't separate IT. Immediately you start having separate goals and agendas the business people start hating you and you stop contributing effectively to the future of the company. This means that you have more difficulty getting budgets justified to actually do things. There are advantages to having a separate IT department; it may make it possible to have a coherent vision and fewer systems doing the same things. However, these advantages could be achieved by having a CTO/CIO type with technical knowledge and vision and healthy cooperation and discussion between departments.

As far as you can; keep the IT people as close as possible to the business and use virtual cooperation (IRC if you can, some kind of Yammer type system if you can't) and common sense to achieve common systems. Be aware that this makes IT look more expensive since you start actually doing more and you start fulfilling business demands. Make sure that if some idiot comes around trying to measure that you have a way of identifying and justifying the extra part of the cost which comes from actually doing useful things rather than just blocking the work of the rest of the company.

Obviously, for empire building reasons everyone else seems to have mentioned, this ideal vision very seldom actually happens.