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:So let me get this right (Score:5, Interesting)
With that big an organization... (Score:2, Interesting)
... I'm thinking that you should probably split it off from your development department.
Here's why (from a developer perspective).
It's better for devs to have someone else build a good wall around their sandbox (note: around, not through) then to have us devs make the entire organization's security match our own needs. We're probably competent enough to do things right, just as we are competent to test our own software. And we'll get it right most of the time. Thing is, we'd rather be developing new and cool stuff than doing security and installations for folks most of the time, and thus, get lazy, or miss things that might be obvious to those who aren't so closely involved with the problems that they only see the detail, and not the bigger picture.
And before I get jumped, a good IT department facilitates development, not stifles it, by doing day to day necessary tasks and keeping the decks clear for the developers. And yes, they do exist. True, there are some really bad and draconian ones out there - but it doesn't have to be that way.
Also, it's probably cheaper to hire IT folks than to pay qualified developers to run IT.
Usually IT and engineers battle (Score:5, Interesting)
This is weird because being in the telecom biz for 20 years on and off, including working at a place that owned a lot more stations than the Poster owns, traditionally IT and engineering have always run separate networks and always been at each others throats. To the extreme of having two boxes on one desk, one on the eng network and one on the IT network and an air gap between the LANs.
Traditionally the way it seems to play out is the "IT" network is plain vanilla all microsoft centrally controlled and mainly focused on office drone productivity. Meaning the most specialized software IT supports is "Excel". The "IT" network swarms with viruses just often enough to terrify management at any suggestion of merging the IT and production networks (some "humorously" accuse the engineers of creating said crisis intentionally). The large IT network is famous for layer 2 routing loops (I can't believe they shut off spanning tree!) and whats best described as stupid OSPF tricks (like aggregating routes that are not "yours").
The engineering network seems to mostly be linux/unixy with not much central control (probably no lan wide file server, probably no wan wide DNS, believe it or not) although "whatever it takes to make a dollar" does fly so there is the occasional stand alone windows PC, which of course never gets updated because no one in engineering runs windows. Sometimes there is a firewall between the production network and the engineering network, or the eng network sometimes "dials into" the IT net via a VPN connection, but often there is an air gap. The secretary who clicks on every pop-up she sees in MSIE has no ability to access, say, the FM radio ad insertion box, although both are in the same building and have "something" plugged into their ethernet ports. Back in ye olden days I heard stories about salesguys hand carrying flashdrives with radio commercials audio files over to an engineer on the production network, I assume this still goes on.
This is also BAU common practice at ISPs and telcos and cablecos (kind of the same organization now, of course).
Some (some!) plants I've worked at are like this.. The CNC lathes and mills, or maybe the printing presses, and maybe the cad operators and/or preprint department live on one network, and the cubedrones in HR live on another network, and never the two shall meet nor are they maintained and controlled by the same people. Often, in the olden days, they used different technology, like if it was a "plant" the plant network was probably that 100-base-F fiber or whatever it was called and the cubedrones all lived on conventional cat-5 for obvious length limitations and also ground loop issues.
So that's your first job, decide how you'll interface the cubedrones with production/engineering, assuming they'll be interoperable at all, in any means what-so-ever. If you are not familiar with the telecom term/concept "demarc" well then you are in for a big education, thats all I can say.
Ditto (Score:3, Interesting)
This is weird because being in the telecom biz for 20 years on and off, including working at a place that owned a lot more stations than the Poster owns, traditionally IT and engineering have always run separate networks and always been at each others throats. To the extreme of having two boxes on one desk, one on the eng network and one on the IT network and an air gap between the LANs.
Likewise - I was in radio broadcasting as an assistant chief engineer for 8 years, and we and IT were always at each other's throats... They had the usual "we're the only ones allowed admin rights" attitude, which interfered with my ability to work on our digital audio workstations and automation systems. Eventually, it blew up, and we severed our networks. Anything that played audio became an "engineering" machine, and they were reduced to tending the email server and machines in the marketing department.
To the original questioner - it's important to bear in mind that, unlike many industries, engineering is a core aspect of the broadcasting business... The justification for having an IT department in a broadcasting company are not the same as with any small business, such as a small accounting firm, retail shop, dentist office, etc., where there's no one with the skills to maintain computers and manage a network. Instead, the justification is that it frees up the engineers to take care of transmitters and studios if they don't have to waste time re-imaging the receptionist's machine after he or she installed a dozen browser toolbars. But IT therefore is a subset of engineering... not a standalone department.
Yes you should, and engineering will fight you. (Score:3, Interesting)
Background: I worked for 7 years in TV/Radio IT. Joined when our dept. was very small (3 people: me in support, a network manager and an IT director) and the company was one (national) TV channel. When I left IT was over 50 people, over a dozen TV channels, several high-traffic websites and dozens of radio stations. I was the technology director for New Media when I left (so you can tell how long ago that was... "New Media").
You will find as your company grows the need for IT will become more obvious:
There are dozens of things like this. The thing is, if you ask any broadcast engineer, they will tell you they can and should be handling this, largely because they have been doing it until now. In our case it was a protracted battle to wrench these things away from broadcast operations, but we had a very savvy and strong-willed IT director who would not back down from a fight. What we ended up with was IT (reporting into the finance VP at the time, now into the CTO) overseeing everything that is not directly related to broadcast operations, and Operations controlling their own network and machines, editing suites, AS/400 and specialty hardware that only they used.
What we realized was there were actually very few points where these two entities overlap, and since neither side wanted much to do with the other anyway it all worked out well in the end.