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?

Comments

Re:If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[beelsebob]

It is as though the purpose of IT departments is to find a reason to say "NO" to everything

Yup - there's far too many IT departments out there where the guys in them have an over-inflated sense of their importance. They've come up with the process which makes their life easiest, and they'll be damned if they'll change it because it doesn't fit the business' needs, let alone if someone in charge comes and tells them it doesn't work.

Crazy policies like "you're not allowed control over the software that runs on your computer", or "you're not allowed to connect hardware to the network without us checking it out first".

Yes, I realize these are common policies, but they're also entirely unnecessary. I know for a fact that there's some really large companies (ones with market caps above half a trillion dollars), where those policies don't apply, even to the HR staff, and their networks continue to function just fine.