

I quit my job today, oh boy - ghiotion
http://tales-of-an-it-director.blogspot.com/2008/06/i-quit-my-job-today.html

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cscott
There's an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review that breaks down
the relationship between IT and the business depending on two factors: the
reliability of IT and the need for IT innovation in the line of business.

The result is that you can lump the relationship of IT and the business into 4
categories:

Defensive: Factory Mode (High Reliability Need, Low Innovation Need)
Defensive: Support Mode (Low Reliability Need, Low Innovation Need) Offensive:
Strategic Mode (High Reliability Need, High Innovation Need) Offensive:
Turnaround Mode (Low Reliability Need, High Innovation Need)

If the blog poster worked for a company in the defensive mode categories, his
approach would definitely not be welcome in most cases, unless he had a major
reliability argument.

Hopefully, he found a position in a company aligned with the Offensive side of
the quadrants.

The article I mentioned is Nolan & McFarlen, "Information Technology and the
Board of Directors", Harvard Business Review, Oct 2005.

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okeumeni
Over the years I found that the fundamental problem between IT and Business
people is trust.

IT folks (me included) consider themselves too smart for the MBA guys, as they
call them, incapable of understanding the basics principles. IT folks rarely
bother to speak frankly in company meetings because they thinks other folks
will never get it; they push everyone else to consider then as a black box
with ability to solve business life saving problems.

The reality is the MBA guys runs the business and are force to interact with
the inhuman black box like they will do with a vending machine: You place an
order, get results and move on.

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akraut
This article really hit the nail on the head about what's wrong with large
corporate IT. Unless your business is IT, the upper management just don't
understand it, therefore it's just part of doing business.

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run4yourlives
What exactly should IT be to a non-IT business? Why should it get any better
treatment than Finance or HR?

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OneSeventeen
I think the assertion was not that they should get better treatment, but that
they should get equal treatment. I may have misinterpreted, of course.

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run4yourlives
I was replying though to the poster, not so much the article, specifically as
he stated that they are "just a part of the business".

I'm not sure what else they should be, exactly.

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figured
Finance and HR are seen as an integral part of the company, IT is seen as a
vendor. It is very much and patron-client relationship, when it should be a
partnership

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edw519
_The majority of changes in CA IT are driven by the business._

Exactly! As it should be. (As it better be.) The challenge for IT is to prove
what they want is in the best interest of the _business_ , not the IT
department. We know that, we just have trouble _communicating_ it.

 _Why should the business care about getting new servers or having developers
waste their time rewriting already functioning code?_

It's _your_ job to answer that question. They just don't know. I had a client
with slow response times the previous holiday season. Business had doubled
since then. I had to paint a clear picture of what it would be like on the
same infrastruture for the upcoming holiday season. x dollars spent vs. y
business lost. That's a language they can understand.

 _Most people in corporate IT want to do a good job._

And that job is much more than development or administration. One of corporate
IT's biggest job is _education_. We shouldn't blame others for not
understanding what is clear to us. It's also our job to get them to "see the
light".

(Maybe that's why I like hacking so much. I find it much easier communicating
with my computer than with the bosses.)

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ajross
Not necessarily as it should be. Many modern business models really are, at
their core, automation problems. Think of the heavily automated factory, or
brokerage. These firms clearly need "domain expertise" in what they do, but
the minute-to-minute operation of the business is done not by the experts, but
by the automation systems.

In such a circumstance, it might make sense for the "IT" department to
actually run the show, and use the experts in a consulting role. Instead, as
the linked blog points out, the opposite is usually true.

And it's not like this hasn't been done. Look at Amazon: that's exactly what
they are. Business-wise, they're just another mail order retailer. But they
think of themselves as a software company, and they've been immensely
successful.

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edw519
Amazon's excellent technology is the _result_ of IT serving its business
requirements, not the _cause_ of it.

Although they started out selling books, they had a grander vision. Sometimes
I wonder if AWS was really planned or if it's just a byproduct of IT doing its
job so well. This wouldn't be the first time a non-tech firm has become a tech
firm once it realized that its most valuable asset was the techology it
developed to serve its original needs.

~~~
Tamerlin
<http://coderific.com/employers/7>

~~~
allenbrunson
Interesting. I've never read so many negative things about Amazon in one place
before.

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dejb
... now I'm a lucky man who made the grade. Although the news is rather sad.
Well I just had to laugh.

