I had a similar experience w/Apple. A startup I worked for was brought into Cupertino for a meeting w/their internal business teams. They wanted us to build them an app which seemed relatively simple involving their internal Cafe Mac cafeterias, data centers, and possibly retail locations. It was something that a company like Apple could build in their sleep. But the business folks we met with said that's how it is at Apple, all the engineering talent goes towards the product side and almost nothing is left for internal IT. They told us how they struggled to get anything done and there were almost no resources available, so the business teams had to go and hire their own IT if they needed things done.
> But the business folks we met with said that's how it is at Apple
That's how it is at most companies.
Split orgs (IT & business) result in only work of sufficient size, scope, and impact being able to cross the barrier.
Multi-year logistics management rewrite? You'll get two IT teams.
Frank in accounting needs to schedule a daily job to copy from one datastore to another? He doesn't have permissions to, and has been doing it manually for the last 5 years.
IMHO, every org along those lines would benefit from an independent IT tiger-team whose sole job it is to find business problems and apply technology to solve them.
Most IT departments I've seen are composed of "Desktop Support" kind of personas and are viewed as cost centers.
So they are understaffed and underskilled and use a very conservative approach to system management.
Want to encourage power users? Invest in your IT department, improve developer/engineering - IT relationships.
In my current gig, the IT department has a somewhat friendly cooperative relationship with the SRE org. The SRE's build some automation for important tasks (like onboarding) which the IT team operates; the SRE team is available to help the IT team when things go wrong with such tools. Its not the main focus of either team, but the relationship has produced a very effective IT org.
> IMHO, every org along those lines would benefit from an independent IT tiger-team whose sole job it is to find business problems and apply technology to solve them
You're describing external consultantcies. Some are good and do as you describe, but some are bad and work simply to find more work.
Not in practice, unless they're signed to a guaranteed, multi-year, cross-org contract. Fixed price has so many issues. Hourly has its own Pandora's box.
The incentives (mostly turn time) are just too misaligned to create good solutions, even with good consultants.
Consultants also aren't empowered to fundamentally push back on a client's demands, nor have existing relationship with other IT orgs they'll need buy-in from to get durable work finished.
