Where Does IT Fall Within Your Organization? 243
ros256 writes "I help out a relatively small (100 employees) medical device company that does not have a dedicated IT department. Instead the network admin reports to a manager in the Clinical department. Although this seems unusual to me, the organization isn't really structured at this point to have IT staff report to a department more relevant to the work they do. I've been giving thought as to where within the organization would make more sense. So, I pose this question to the Slashdot community: Where does IT fall within the organizations you work with?"
"Corporate Services" (Score:2, Informative)
well... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm at a university (Score:5, Informative)
IT at a 400+ Enterprise Software Company (Score:1, Informative)
There's a reason I'm posting as Anon.
IT at my company reports to the CFO. And as a result they definitely don't support the needs of the Engineering Dept. So the Engineering Dept. has its own IT group that effectively does things like making sure the automated testing system is up, making sure backups are done, making sure programmers can do their job without having to worry about hardware infrastructure. The CFO IT still handles stuff like the phones, the network, internal security (which they're notoriously bad at actually notifying users of changes).
Having IT report to the CFO is exactly how I would _not_ do it if I had a say.
Work under where the money is at. (Score:2, Informative)
TL~DR Your boss should be someone with purchasing authority.
Finance (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Few places... (Score:2, Informative)
IT should be infrastructure only (Score:5, Informative)
IT infrastructure should be handled by an IT department (network, server & storage support, basic desktop supply and support) but it should NOT handle such things as database development and management, application development, etc.
Unfortunately, many companies class anything to do with a computer as "IT" and treat a DBA the way they treat a desktop support flunky. Many times I have worked for organizations that decided to grab every departmental programmer or DBA and bring him/her into the IT department, to the severe detriment of the department he/she used to support.
At one company I worked for they outsourced all the IT and made the programmers, DBAs, developers, etc. go work for the contractor. Lots of them quit and went to better jobs, so the contractor brought in many of their folks from India to fill the open positions. It was a disaster. Eventually most of the departments hired developers, DBA's, programmers, etc. of their own and just gave them all generic "Engineer" titles.
Re:IT at a 400+ Enterprise Software Company (Score:1, Informative)
I work for a largish company (7000ish staff). We have a separate division for IT. They provide infrastructure, manage the PC hardware support subcontract, mainframe, aervers etc, however they have everything locked down so tight it is silly and getting them to make any changes for anything other than a director level project is near impossible.
As a result most departments have pockets of people who (like me) are employed to do a regular job in that department but unofficially do what they can to keep local stuff running, make improvements as far as we can within the IT Division's restrictions and provide help people who are less capable.
As a result, I am officially a Printer Operator (for fast 10k pages/hour web printers) however I spend all my time working on applications written in MS Access databases (the most powerful programming environment they will allow anyone who isn't an official IT developer), maintaining our production print server (which thankfully is under our direct control) and supporting everything from management information (for all levels of management up to director) to complex mailmerges (100k+ letters per merge) to team leaders that can't figure out how to add up a column in Excel.
Some days I yearn for small...
Re:Few places... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cost centre vs investment centre (Score:4, Informative)
In modern American businesses, everything's a "cost center" except sales and top management itself. This specifically includes not only IT but product development. Thus, sales is the darling of the execs and everyone else gets the shaft.