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

[j-pimp]

Maybe he is simply a bad communicator in general, or bad at communicating to the business stakeholders. From his point of view it would be a good idea, because he sees IT as a separate discipline from engineering (in the sense of the particular discipline of television engineering I presume). He knows it would be better for him if he was in a separate IT department, but he doesn't know how to sell it to the business. There have been times where I felt I was right, but lacked the domain knowledge to make the case to the other side. For example, look at this question on english.stackexchange.com. I emailed ESR and requested he answer this question because I knew he had 1) good communication skills, 2) a better understanding of English and languages in general then I had, and 3) an understanding of DNS. While I am an OK communicator, I lack the in depth domain knowledge of linguistics to put forth an argument as eloquently as he does. To put it another way, pretend you wanted a raise. You know why its good for you, and you may understand why you are undervalued. However, you may not know how to sell it to your boss.

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

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

To synergize our leveragables into a new cloud based paradygmn, we'll need a new solutions oriented IT team to create some actionables to create a win-win in reducing internal friction and increase efficiencies to enable the monitization of our empowered workforce.

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

[Flyerman]

We put the IT in monitization.

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.

Re:So let me get this right

[wiedzmin]

Agreed, I think that's the only functional model for IT - make it a separate unit funded through charge-backs to other units, as opposed to company budget allocation. Every budgeted IT team I've worked for was overlooked and perpetually underfunded. Chargebacks help distribute the costs across userbase and increase visibility into actual IT costs. Otherwise - IT is an unnecessary, non-money-generating department that hemorrhages money and creates downtimes for maintenance of stuff that works anyways.

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.

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.

Usually IT and engineers battle

[vlm]

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.