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Ask Slashdot: What Are The Lesser-Known Roles Of The IT Department?
chadenright writes:
On the same day that I was hired into a new IT position, my new employer also bought a pair of $1,500 conference phones from a third-party vendor, which turned out to be defective; I've spent a chunk of the last two weeks arguing with the vendor. During the process I've learned that, as the IT guy, I'm also the antibody of the corporation and my job is to prevent not just malware and viruses but also junk hardware from entering my business's system. As a software engineer who is new to the IT side of things, I have to ask, what else have you learned about IT?
What fresh hell has this software engineer gotten themselves into? Leave your best answers in the comments. What are the lesser-known roles of the IT department?
What fresh hell has this software engineer gotten themselves into? Leave your best answers in the comments. What are the lesser-known roles of the IT department?
My role in IT was to stop people buying hardware and software without thinking through how it would be used, how all the bits would integrate together and who would support it. I work in hospitals, and they are the worst so far. Clinical departments think it is a good idea to spend a pile of money on some piece of hardware or software, only to find they either can't use it, it is too complex for their staff to learn, it doesn't fit with anything else, it has a huge dependency on something they didn't buy and so on. Most of it ends up not ever being used - hence shelfware.
IT departments almost never "run" businesses, or if they do, they do so poorly. I've run into so many tail-wagging-the-dog situations in which a customer's business people were hamstrung by their IT departments. It is as though the purpose of IT departments is to find a reason to say "NO" to everything - to find excuses instead of solutions. It was so refreshing when I finally ran into a customer who had their ducks in a row. The CIO emphatically said, "Out of the question! Absolutely not!" to a proposal we made. The CEO turned to him and coolly informed him this was a business initiative that was critical to their company's growth and that he wanted a plan on his desk post-haste.
There seems to be some critical mass beyond which in-house IT departments become stagnant and try to usurp control of the company. It's as though IT workers were bullied when they were in school and now it's payback time.
lol, IT is everything that should work but doesnt which includes...from the help desk at level 1...the light bulbs in every office to the starbucks coffee pot in a vp's office that got unplugged by the janitor that works graves. as soon as the general public walks out of their house, gets into their vehicle to drive to work...their IQ drops to 0. they just expect IT to work but are clueless on how to plug the coffee pot back in.
I've done I.T. for everything from "running out of a large garage" type businesses to mid size companies with multiple offices.
I'd have to say the weirdest variety of job expectations were at the smallest places. When you're the only I.T. guy hired full-time at a small business, you're immediately viewed as one of the "smart guys" who surely knows how to do X, Y and Z that people want to do - regardless of if it has much of anything to do with computers.
The weirdest tasks of all had to be when I applied for a job in the local newspaper for a Macintosh tech for a small start-up business that wanted to refurbish older Macs and PCs to resell in daycare settings and secondarily to the public as "great first computers for small kids". I was unemployed at the time and needed to make the house and car payment, so wasn't being too selective. It turned out, the guy running this business came up with the idea because he already owned a number of daycare centers, as well as other rental property. He was a long time fan of Apple Macs, even though he wasn't that great at using them. (He was your typical older guy who attended those monthly users' group meetings held at the local library and knew just enough to be dangerous.) One of the interesting features of his house was this HUGE multi-bay garage built into the back side of a hill. He put about 6 rows of shelving units in part of it, where he collected up old, obsolete Macs that area schools, the local newspaper and others wanted to get rid of. He'd drive his van out to one of these places every so often with a trailer attached, and bring back 25 to 50 of the machines at a time.
The rest of this garage was stuffed full with other odds and ends that looked like a scene from one of those "American Pickers" episodes on TV. He had tool and die equipment (as he said he used to work in that field years back), a huge collection of paint cans of various colors (probably whatever was left when his rentals needed repainting), a lot of miscellaneous hardware like chains, bolts, hooks, and several vehicles including an older car with less than 500 miles on it, sitting under a cover.
Right away, this guy was maddening to work for. He insisted that I punch in and out on this old time clock he had sitting in the back on a desk. It was one of those green metal analog clocks where you had to line up the paper time card just right and press the big steel button on top to stamp your time on it. And as it was as ancient as most other junk in his garage, the clock often stopped -- so you had to make sure it was set right before punching your card. And the time it printed was barely legible either. I was supposed to be refurbishing these old Macs, putting collections of kids' games and learning programs on them, and tagging them with price sheets that told you exactly what the computer's configuration was. In reality, I'd get one or two finished only to find the hard drives were dying and they'd only boot correctly every other time. Then, I had to dig through a collection of used hard drives he kept around to try to find one that worked well enough so it would hold the information in a stable manner. Every so often, he'd come around trying to micro-manage my work and scold me about something or other I should be doing, in his opinion, in order to work faster.
At some point, he figured out I knew how to do things like update web sites, so he'd regularly pull me away from what I was doing to come up to his office in the main part of the house. There, he'd have me update his daycare center web site or upload photos and edit descriptions of his rental homes, or edit listings on his personal .Mac web page trying to sell some of those nuts, bolts and chains he had around.
In the winter months, he had this wood burning furnace contraption he built to heat the garage. So I had the task of tending the fire in it and adding logs to it regularly each day.
Eventually, he decided to try to sell a bunch of these computers at a computer show at an area
Your wise friend isn't very wise.
Within the past six months? IT saved a hundred million dollar contract because we made an incredibly simple reporting portal. Think web version of Excel. Customer loved it. They did not want random Excel files with literally ten thousand VLOOKUPs every morning, which was the previous 'solution'. IT engineered a last minute audio-visual display for a very high name project. We bought and built something for a fraction the cost of leasing, and ended up using the very nice TVs afterwards to upgrade our conference rooms. We not only saved the company money on replacement, we turned a profit. IT facilitated selling stuff the company used to throw out. More money.
If your IT department is a financial black hole, either you don't get what they do or their head needs to be fired. They should always be earning their keep.
I was/am that guy, and while much of what you say has merit there is a bonus; my work ethic has exposed me to virtually every system out there and because I took responsibility for it, I've had to become a passable expert in it. This has tremendously increased my worth in a field where the only way to make the big bucks is to jump ship. Several times.
That obviously doesn't apply to someone who doesn't want to play that game, so take it for what it's worth.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
So if it has anything to do about computers they ask the IT guy even though they are so many different levels you can specialize in.
Not just computers. Anything with electricity and/or a sensor.
My first job I had a VP who needed a large corner office with lots of windows at the far end of the building. And she needed to be able to walk into it through the emergency exit next to the office, because she couldn't be asked to walk through the whole building. So we were asked to make the security work out so she could have her own private doorway. And we were not allowed to spend any money doing it. End result? We just disabled the alarm and security on that door.
Her second issue was that her big corner office at the far end of the building with lots of windows was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Compounding this, she needed to have her door closed all the time, and sat nearly touching the window. Since she had a thermostat, she constantly adjusted it. Not realizing that it didn't do anything, because it was just there to gather zone temp information. IT would get a request every week or two to fix her thermostat, because her office was uncomfortable. Finally got approval to get the HVAC guys in, and they immediately pointed out that when the building was built, they cheaped out on the HVAC system and it didn't have capacity to cool the square footage of that wing. Given this new information, the VP continued to ask IT to fix her thermostat every few weeks.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yes, it was a union shop last I worked. That was the other final nail in the coffin for me at that place; my union dues took a giant bite out of miniscule paycheck. As long as it's voluntary, I'm ok with Unions; and for people that make it a career to work there, being part of the Union is probably a good thing. But I was young and got suckered into signing the dotted line. I take full responsibility for not knowing what the fuck I was signing; lesson learned. But, at least they could have advised us a little more clearly on which scenario would best fit someone in my situation that only wished to work part-time and for a limited period. There's no way in hell I would have gotten a benefit from paying those dues, and I think they knew that!
Life is not for the lazy.
In addition to handling all software and hardware installation and support we are supposedly supposed to know every employee's role so that we can do their jobs for them. It never ceases to amaze me how many people think it's my job to do a vlookup or setup fuel routing solutions. Apparently we don't require our employees to know a damn thing, just push it to the I.T. department to get it done....in a company with 1,000+ employees and an I.T. staff of 5.
Notice I didn't say that we purchase software. No no....that would mean that we're involved in that process. Instead some other department purchases the software and then notifies IT after the fact. It doesn't matter if it will work with existing hardware/software because the software salesman said it will work just fine. And salesmen never lie.
Some days I think I would rather flip burgers for a living.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson