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

If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[bferrell]

You may have been living in some sort of fantasy world of siloed functions.

In a large enough organization, there might be specialists in telecom, desktop hardware and server hardware, but usually IT, in general, is charged with all facets of the IT plant... Workstations, servers, networking hardware and telecom (including switching, carrier interconnect and endpoints like conference phones).

If what you want is to JUST develop software, you need to be in a different role.

Re:If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, if it has electricity or moving parts, it seems to be I.T. Yes, you will get helpdesk tickets about the vending machine.

And since I.T. tends to be the one dept that has actual tools and an understanding of systems, our one seems to end up fixing doors.

Re:If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[Kjella]

Since he describes himself as "the IT guy" I think this is very far from the enterprise, probably a jack-of-all-trades position in a small company. Since he switched from software development he probably thought of it as running operations keeping the production servers, clients and the network running, secure and up to date.

As a software engineer who is new to the IT side of things, I have to ask, what else have you learned about IT?

I never worked that position but... forget the I in IT. You're now the "tech guy", expect to deal with everything from conference phones, photocopiers, printers, the coffee machine, the vending machine, phones and tablets, basically everything the janitor won't touch. And even then expect to get roped in if the thermostat or window shutters aren't working properly to see if you have any tech tips. If you become a bigger organization you split out the server/client into ops and leave the rest for an infrastructure guy. If you become really big you split out the network from that again and put that into ops too. But until there's somebody else you can point to - and no, they think of you as the most qualified "tech" person - you're stuck with it.

Re: If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[dougdonovan]

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.

Re:If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[RobinH]

There's some truth in this. In our organization, we get audited for ISO 900x compliance every year, and they have to go through all of our processes and validate that we're following our procedures, etc., but during that audit, if the answer is, "our ERP system does that / enforces that" then the auditor essentially goes, "ok, good" and moves on. The funny thing is that we have a custom-programmed ERP system that we're updating and changing all the time. The auditor certainly never audits our software development process or how we incorporate business processes into the ERP system. Apparently to him it's just "magic." However, people come to me (the ERP programmer) all the time with process problems, and I implement solutions directly in the ERP system to solve those problems, often only with the input of the person doing the job, because in many cases it's just obvious what should be done. I occasionally bring these decisions up to management, but most of the time they just defer to me anyway. So in many ways IT here (or at least the ERP development part) is just a branch of management. I find the whole thing rather silly.

Re:If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[DigiShaman]

Forgive me in advance, as I've told this story before: Back in the mid 90's, I used to work part-time at Kroger (grocery store) as sacker. That job paid minimum wage, but, we got tips for sacking the groceries, carting them off to the parking lot, and unloading them into the back of the vehicle. I don't see that going on anymore, an in many cases, the person working the till does the bagging (customer still puts the bags into his/her own cart). But I digress...

One day, the janitor was out for a week. I was called out to fill the position in his absence. In fact, just to show how hard of a worker I was, I took extra effort to clean the restrooms and mops the floors more thoroughly. Never did see that guy come back to work. However, I was rewarded via holding the janitor position for the remainder of my employment (which I quit after six months). Why would I stick around?? I worked harder, and made LESS money as it was still minimum wage WITHOUT tips. Yeah, I said to myself "fuck this shit, I'm out of here!".

So what's the point in telling this story?? That no good deed goes unpunished. If you work in IT, don't be "that guy". Being the eager beaver will get you known as the tech guy who's prompt. That's a bonus, but it will hold you back from further advancement. Trust me, I know how that movie played out too.

Oh, what's it like to be young, ignorant, and down right foolish. I wish I could go back in time and slap myself several times, HARD!

Re:If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[dbIII]

"you're not allowed to connect hardware to the network without us checking it out first"

Somewhere behind rules like that is an idiot who brought in a device like a wireless router that acted as a DHCP server or similar and kicked a pile of people off a network annoying a manager enough to implement such a policy. Sure, expensive hardware rolled out everywhere can protect against that, but a policy of "ask before you plug it in" is a lot cheaper than replacing a lot of stuff just in case of people doing stupid stuff.
Also some hardware on networks is so fragile that anything sending weird packets to it can take it down (HP and Samsung I'm looking at you).
You are not that idiot the rule is for but in a large enough org there will be a few.

Re:If you thought enterprise IT was just software

[Anon-Admin]

Having worked in IT for over 30 years and having worked for Fortune 100 companies, I have never see it work this way.

I have seen C-Level executives come in with a great new idea about how they were going to save the company millions by changing everybody's desktop to BYOD. Thus eliminating the need for the company to buy, maintain, and repair desktop systems. That lasted all of 30 days before security and legal come down on him.

In today's corporate IT environment we have to meet regulations. They may be something as simple as SOX or as complex as GxP. In those regulatory environments having an open network where everyone can bring in any piece of equipment and plug it is becomes a major problem. As such there are policies in place, there is training, there are physical restrictions, and there are software enforced restrictions.

I am currently working for a rather large Aerospace company that was recently acquired by another company. The new management seem to have problems understanding that having everyone on one network is an issue. The new company has locations in China, Taiwan, and Korea. The company they bought handles government contracts from everyday items to items that are classified. It is a violation of federal law to have foreign nationals on our network because of the government contracts we have.

So, from a management point of view I am sure that having everyone able to bring in whatever they want and connect it sounds great. however in the real world IT and IT Security are the ones that have to, not only manage them, but they also work to mitigate the legal risk. Some of the more important jobs in IT, is to protect the company's digital assets. Including understanding the laws, regulations, requirements, and licensing of the products the company uses.

The risk to turn on itself

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You know how some people have their immune system turn on themselves.

Some IT-departments becomes like that.
Instead of stopping malware and junk hardware they stop everything. It makes their job easier.

A good IT department tries to figure out what the person they stopped was trying to accomplish and tries to find a secure way of doing that.
Blocking everything would be like a janitor keeping everyone else out since maintenance gets easier that way.
While the method works for their immediate task the company cannot survive such measures.

Re:IT is a black hole

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so wise.

Imagine running a company without IT. Compete with typewriters, rotary phones, snail mail, and nothing but manual processes.

IT is the bedrock of every modern business. Without it, you might as well be Amish.

Here's my list of lesser known roles

[Qbertino]

- maintaining a high-traffic quake 3 arena server on company Hardware without anyone noticing

- coming up with elaborate and well worded excuses as to why I don't have time to set up and maintain MS Office 365 and it's groupware mess and have them let the intern/media-communications do it (the poor fellows)

- explaining for the n-th time to the utterly clueless online team and the consultant PMs what the difference between a client and a server is, why versioning is important, that it's not *my* versioning but *our* versioning, why ci is a good idea, why manual ftp and working directly on live is a bad idea

- stareing, day in and day out with awe and amazement at the ultimate shitfest that is WordPresses application architecture and wondering how we as a human race even got this far ... That's just from the top of my head.

Re: electricity

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuses are tricky. Just use a penny and pit the old dude back in. Works great. I work in fire insurance, btw.

Re: IT is a black hole

[jon3k]

You think that in house IT guy is taking advantage of you? Wait until IBM gets their hands on you.

Re:IT is a black hole

[Anon-Admin]

Last time I was told "IT is just a cost center" I looked at the VP and asked where he heard that. When he responded with "Accounting" I pointed out that accounting was a cost center as well, heck even your management position is a cost center. I don't understand what IT being a cost center has to do with anything as everyone not in sales is a cost center.