Why IT Departments are Bad for IT Departments

I've worked in a lot ot IT shops. Some good, some bad, some very bad. At each, I notice a very curious phenomenon; everyone outside of IT thought the IT folks were arrogant boneheads.

Sometimes they had a point. But in every case that opinion could have been mitigated by some common sense on the part of the IT department.

Take one shop I recently worked at. It was a pretty large IT department, with managers galore, an employee for just about everything, and dozens of consultants and contractors to do the things the managers didn't trust the staff to do. As you can probably tell, we're already getting into hot water. When a department has such a large headcount, especially in these economic times, other departments begin to wonder what they're getting for the money? And if IT has so many people, why do they still need contractors for everything? Why not just teach the staff to do things, and use the staff?

It all hinges, in large part, to the nature of managers in most IT shops. In the old days, your boss could do your job. That's how he got to be boss, by doing your job so well he got promoted to being in charge of other people doing the same job.

Not anymore.

Somehow administrators became in charge. In the place I worked, my immediate supervisor had minimal IT skills (i.e. he could get his laptop turned on without a call to the Help Desk), and the Department Director had absolutely none. Case in point, I was in a meeting with the Director a full year after I had been hired, when she told me she didn't realize I wasn't a programmer, and she wouldn't have hired me if she had known. I was dumbfounded. I was the Web Manager, hired after an extensive and expensive search for someone with just my particular set of skills. The business hadn't been able to successfully redesign their Web site in five years, so they went on a vast manhunt to find someone who designed portals for a living. I made it very clear I wasn't a backend guy, and the hiring committee (committee!) was ok with that; they had plenty of programmers who would be working for me. To find out after all that - and a year into my employment to boot - that the IT Department Director had no idea what I did...well...that sort of thing shows.

It was no wonder that the other departments felt the IT department was a waste of money. From their point of view, it was.

Although that, admittedly, was an extreme case, similar things are common. Businesses realize that IT is needed in the same way that a car needs fuel, but they don't realize that done right, IT can be so much more. An IT department shouldn't be a complete and seperate entity from other parts of a business. It should be integrated. Managers should have both IT and business experience so that they can do more than push around papers and resources, they can act as real thought leaders, finding the right technology to match with a real business need. Help Desks will always bee needed, but an IT shop shouldn't JUST be a Help Desk. It's an additional way of accomplishing the goals of the business, using a very specific set of skills and experience.