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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."
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?
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.
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).
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...
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This is weird because being in the telecom biz for 20 years on and off, including working at a place that owned a lot more stations than the Poster owns, traditionally IT and engineering have always run separate networks and always been at each others throats. To the extreme of having two boxes on one desk, one on the eng network and one on the IT network and an air gap between the LANs.
Traditionally the way it seems to play out is the "IT" network is plain vanilla all microsoft centrally controlled and mainly focused on office drone productivity. Meaning the most specialized software IT supports is "Excel". The "IT" network swarms with viruses just often enough to terrify management at any suggestion of merging the IT and production networks (some "humorously" accuse the engineers of creating said crisis intentionally). The large IT network is famous for layer 2 routing loops (I can't believe they shut off spanning tree!) and whats best described as stupid OSPF tricks (like aggregating routes that are not "yours").
The engineering network seems to mostly be linux/unixy with not much central control (probably no lan wide file server, probably no wan wide DNS, believe it or not) although "whatever it takes to make a dollar" does fly so there is the occasional stand alone windows PC, which of course never gets updated because no one in engineering runs windows. Sometimes there is a firewall between the production network and the engineering network, or the eng network sometimes "dials into" the IT net via a VPN connection, but often there is an air gap. The secretary who clicks on every pop-up she sees in MSIE has no ability to access, say, the FM radio ad insertion box, although both are in the same building and have "something" plugged into their ethernet ports. Back in ye olden days I heard stories about salesguys hand carrying flashdrives with radio commercials audio files over to an engineer on the production network, I assume this still goes on.
This is also BAU common practice at ISPs and telcos and cablecos (kind of the same organization now, of course).
Some (some!) plants I've worked at are like this.. The CNC lathes and mills, or maybe the printing presses, and maybe the cad operators and/or preprint department live on one network, and the cubedrones in HR live on another network, and never the two shall meet nor are they maintained and controlled by the same people. Often, in the olden days, they used different technology, like if it was a "plant" the plant network was probably that 100-base-F fiber or whatever it was called and the cubedrones all lived on conventional cat-5 for obvious length limitations and also ground loop issues.
So that's your first job, decide how you'll interface the cubedrones with production/engineering, assuming they'll be interoperable at all, in any means what-so-ever. If you are not familiar with the telecom term/concept "demarc" well then you are in for a big education, thats all I can say.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is weird because being in the telecom biz for 20 years on and off, including working at a place that owned a lot more stations than the Poster owns, traditionally IT and engineering have always run separate networks and always been at each others throats. To the extreme of having two boxes on one desk, one on the eng network and one on the IT network and an air gap between the LANs.
Likewise - I was in radio broadcasting as an assistant chief engineer for 8 years, and we and IT were always at each other's throats... They had the usual "we're the only ones allowed admin rights" attitude, which interfered with my ability to work on our digital audio workstations and automation systems. Eventually, it blew up, and we severed our networks. Anything that played audio became an "engineering" machine, and they were reduced to tending the email server and machines in the marketing department.
To the original questioner - it's important to bear in mind that, unlike many industries, engineering is a core aspect of the broadcasting business... The justification for having an IT department in a broadcasting company are not the same as with any small business, such as a small accounting firm, retail shop, dentist office, etc., where there's no one with the skills to maintain computers and manage a network. Instead, the justification is that it frees up the engineers to take care of transmitters and studios if they don't have to waste time re-imaging the receptionist's machine after he or she installed a dozen browser toolbars. But IT therefore is a subset of engineering... not a standalone department.
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.
(I am using standard staff prices for my area, Labor costs can very)
You have 10 engineers who are paid 90k a year. 1/2 of the time they are focusing on IT related issues which isn't their field. (450k spent on IT)
If you hire 4 people in IT that are paid 60k (240k spent on IT) who can focus on their jobs and get more work done as it is in their field.
So in this case the company is currently spending more per IT hour and the effectiveness per it Hour is less.
If you replace it with numbers in your area who knows... You may not be justified for an IT department or you may have a bigger need.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
After reading some comments I have a few ideas. First you don't want an IT department, as the engineering section you want a sub group that focuses on IT. You are already technology management.
The biggest selling point for an IT group IMHO is technology management. In theory you can run without an IT group and the CEO could take on the CFO tasks but it works better when you have an IT group working on utilizing what you are purchasing in the best possible way much like a CFO handles finances. A group that is focused on planning, supporting and implementing an IT strategy rather than letting everyone spend top dollar on whatever they want. Are you publicly traded? If so to my memory there are requirements for IT by the SEC.
To extend the CEO/CFO analogy no one is allowed to justify their expenditures anyway they like, and no one group or individual should be able to use whatever technology they like at the station's expense. Even if someone buys it on their own dollar if it impacts the running of the station or the day to day they will want support. It's best to manage it.
What a good IT dept/group can give you is:
A) Fall back or options : If a server breaks or a hardware goes down they can have contingencies and replacements waiting to minimize downtime.
B) Planning: They can either reduce cost or make better use of what you are spending rather than having HP or Dell be your defacto IT Support.
C) Data management: Do you have backups? Do you have remote access? Do you allow work from home? Information is the new life blood of the contemporary business. Who is handling this precious resource?
D) Security - The Fear Card - do you really want internal memo's leaked because you never had a supportable security policy and someone to implement it?
If you really want to be a bastard recommend ITIL. That will tie up their resources for years but you'll have an IT group. ITIL is crack cocaine for management types.
You are already handling these functions it's just time to take it on and manage it.
You could always make the case for a promotion and be their interim CIO.
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
Background: I worked for 7 years in TV/Radio IT. Joined when our dept. was very small (3 people: me in support, a network manager and an IT director) and the company was one (national) TV channel. When I left IT was over 50 people, over a dozen TV channels, several high-traffic websites and dozens of radio stations. I was the technology director for New Media when I left (so you can tell how long ago that was... "New Media").
You will find as your company grows the need for IT will become more obvious:
There are dozens of things like this. The thing is, if you ask any broadcast engineer, they will tell you they can and should be handling this, largely because they have been doing it until now. In our case it was a protracted battle to wrench these things away from broadcast operations, but we had a very savvy and strong-willed IT director who would not back down from a fight. What we ended up with was IT (reporting into the finance VP at the time, now into the CTO) overseeing everything that is not directly related to broadcast operations, and Operations controlling their own network and machines, editing suites, AS/400 and specialty hardware that only they used.
What we realized was there were actually very few points where these two entities overlap, and since neither side wanted much to do with the other anyway it all worked out well in the end.