Justifications For Creating an IT Department? 214
jjoelc writes "This may sound like an odd request, so first some background. I work at a broadcast television station, and I have found it to be very common for IT to be lumped in with the engineering department at many stations. I believe this is mainly because the engineers were the first people in the business to have and use computers in any real capacity, and as the industry moved to file-based workflows it has simply stayed that way. I believe there is a need for IT to be its own department with its own goals, budgets, etc. But I am having a bit of a rough time putting together the official proposal to justify this change, likely because it seems so obviously the way it should be and is done everywhere else. So I am asking for some pointers on the best ways to present this idea to a general manager. What are the business justifications for having a standalone IT department in a small business? How would you go about convincing upper management of those needs? There are approximately 100 employees at the station I am currently at, but we do own another 4 stations in two states (each of these other stations are in the 75-100 employee range). The long term goal would be to have a unified IT department across all 5 stations."
Re:Counterproductive IMO (Score:3, Informative)
i also worked in the engineering dept of a tv station and i agree with parent. think about the equipment load. sure, there's a dc, a mail server, etc but there's also a ton of satellite, microwave, playout equipment etc that has every bit as much to do with engineering as IT. the important thing to have is a department where IT and engineering can work well together, and in a lot of cases it's totally counterproductive to have a separate department when a large part of your budget is for the acquisition and maintenance of equipment that serves a purpose in both environments.
Broadcast engineering and IT - 2 worlds colliding (Score:2, Informative)
Not many people know what exactly broadcast engineering is and are quick to jump on solutions that involve IT. I'm a broadcast engineer who has been teaching IT to the Broadcast Systems Technology [broadcast.sait.ca] program at SAIT Polytechnic for the past 17 years. The issues surrounding the broadcast industry (television, production houses, etc..) is that there has been an incredible amount of change occuring in the past 10 years.
The transition from analog TV to HDTV has been a steep learning curve as most stations now have two parallel systems running: analog and digital. It is not as if it is just one system either, there's analog and digital audio and video. HDTV does not consist of just one format, there are dozens of formats for HDTV, 480i, 480p, 720i, 702p, 1080i, 1080p, and several transport streams such as mpg2, mpg4, avi, IPTV, etc.. Plus be able to transcode between the formats on the fly. It goes on and on.
These changes affect every step in the process: from production, news gathering, mobiles, remotes, ingest, editing, branding, playout, transmission, etc.. The engineers have to learn all of these new formats on the job while maintaining a station and maintaining sychronicity between the audio and video as the streams are separate. Synchronizing audio and video and then trying to maintain consistent volume levels with a digital signal has turned into a big headache. Volume is not easily measured as one would suspect - it consists of more than the peak levels and includes the background sound which all has to fit in a restricted bandwidth.
Now add into this mix that most new equipment is based on server farms and ethernet, the engineer has to learn networking concepts also such as TCP/IP, routers, VLANs, subnetting and switches, etc.. Just to confuse the issue, there are already analog and digital devices in broadcasting called video and audio routers and switches. A broadcast router is used to select a video or audio source for viewing, editing, etc.. A broadcast switch is used for mixing, creating special effects and creating shows - you've seen pictures of a director sitting in front of monitor wall (which are now going digital) calling the camera shots: take camera two, fade to commercial, etc.. the operator (technical director) is in front of a console full of buttons and levers performing the commands.
The BBC receives about 500 MB of data in a day (old stats), the problem becomes how to manage that much data coming in, how to catalog it using metadata (MXF), determine what to keep, how long to keep it, what to throw out, etc..
Another issue is just to edit HDTV? Uncompressed HDTV 1080p requires 2 Gbps BW for transport. Most transport streams except for 10 Gbps Ethernet aren't there yet. Most editors can't handle data moving that fast so HDTV is transcoded down to a smaller format, edited, then the edit commands perform the edits after to the HDTV to create the final production. This means that each piece of audio and video has to have a time stamp on it called a timecode.
More and more ingest and transmission is being sent through the Internet and private VPNs between stations. Often one station will control all the affiliate stations in the province or state. The affiliate stations will have their servers in the "hq".
Back 5 years ago, you would see maybe 5 or 6 servers in a station, now you see rows of racks of servers of every type that you can imagine. There is a migration now from individual systems with each having its own server and a central storage such as SANs and NAS.
It is easier to teach a broadcast engineer about networking than an IT guy about broadcasting. But it is also imperative to have a trained and knowledgeable IT guys on staff.
Should it be a separate IT dept - absolutely not. The network is not separate, nor should the IT dept be. IT decisions which seem reasonable to an IT person can break the broadcast side or have dire consequences. The broadcast side is the money maker, the IT side supports broadcast.
Opportunity Costs. (Score:4, Informative)
You have 10 engineers who are paid 90k a year. 1/2 of the time they are focusing on IT related issues which isn't their field. (450k spent on IT)
If you hire 4 people in IT that are paid 60k (240k spent on IT) who can focus on their jobs and get more work done as it is in their field.
So in this case the company is currently spending more per IT hour and the effectiveness per it Hour is less.
If you replace it with numbers in your area who knows... You may not be justified for an IT department or you may have a bigger need.
Re:So let me get this right (Score:4, Informative)
He isn't saying to outsource IT, he is saying to break it off into its own business unit at the company.
Give IT a bit more control, and make it a separate entity that is accountable on its own (instead of taking the engineers down maybe?)
IT Functions not IT Department (Score:4, Informative)
After reading some comments I have a few ideas. First you don't want an IT department, as the engineering section you want a sub group that focuses on IT. You are already technology management.
The biggest selling point for an IT group IMHO is technology management. In theory you can run without an IT group and the CEO could take on the CFO tasks but it works better when you have an IT group working on utilizing what you are purchasing in the best possible way much like a CFO handles finances. A group that is focused on planning, supporting and implementing an IT strategy rather than letting everyone spend top dollar on whatever they want. Are you publicly traded? If so to my memory there are requirements for IT by the SEC.
To extend the CEO/CFO analogy no one is allowed to justify their expenditures anyway they like, and no one group or individual should be able to use whatever technology they like at the station's expense. Even if someone buys it on their own dollar if it impacts the running of the station or the day to day they will want support. It's best to manage it.
What a good IT dept/group can give you is:
A) Fall back or options : If a server breaks or a hardware goes down they can have contingencies and replacements waiting to minimize downtime.
B) Planning: They can either reduce cost or make better use of what you are spending rather than having HP or Dell be your defacto IT Support.
C) Data management: Do you have backups? Do you have remote access? Do you allow work from home? Information is the new life blood of the contemporary business. Who is handling this precious resource?
D) Security - The Fear Card - do you really want internal memo's leaked because you never had a supportable security policy and someone to implement it?
If you really want to be a bastard recommend ITIL. That will tie up their resources for years but you'll have an IT group. ITIL is crack cocaine for management types.
You are already handling these functions it's just time to take it on and manage it.
You could always make the case for a promotion and be their interim CIO.
Re:So let me get this right (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So let me get this right (Score:4, Informative)
Otherwise - IT is an unnecessary, non-money-generating department that hemorrhages money and creates downtimes for maintenance of stuff that works anyways.
In a small shop, having a separate IT department can be downright detrimental. IT don't understand unique needs when they sit across a wall, and often become a bottleneck, stumbling block, and someone to avoided to get work done. Without seeing the actual needs, "one size fits all" approaches are taken, which either burns money or doesn't get the job done.
The big difference between system administrators and IT departments is that the former work with the users, anticipating needs and finding special solutions. IT departments are good for generic work, but in a small shop, I believe they have no place.
Re:So let me get this right (Score:2, Informative)
I have also seen the reverse, where the IT department is perceived as this way and ignored. But the other departments don't want to take responsibility for projects which they start or want to underfund.
1) wireless. We want wireless because it is cool and we want it. But we don't want to think about the security. we have it set up at home and don't have a problem, so why can't we just set up a router we buy at Best Buy and do whatever we want.
2) Computers for guests, We want to be able to have people come in and connect to our network so we can share files with them. It's easier for us.
3) We want to be unencumbered with access to internet. We want access to everything and the ability to download anything.
4) We all have information we want to put on file shares, We want to just dump the data up on the servers without restrictions. Who cares if we fill up the hard drives just buy more and bigger hard drives. Who cares if the data is relevant to company business, it's a perk to be able to store video and music files on company servers. We don't want to make decisions about what data is relevant. That requires work and responsibility , we don't have time for it.
5)oh, we want you to make sure you keep track of our critical data but we don't want to stop and tell you where the critical data is. Maybe you should just guess. or better yet , just back up everything.
6) We want to build applications which integrate into our current infrastructure and utilize our company database. Why can't we have full access to the company database to do our development?
7) Despite our requests and endless pleas that we are too restricted by security, we would like to store government restricted data on our network and would like for you to sign off that our network is secure.
These are just a smattering of the issues and complaints , I get from users who think the IT department doesn't serve their needs.