| Let's see.... The skills you need to do IT aren't something you can really learn in school in any way shape or form. These include customer service skills, understanding the needs of a business intimately and learning how real business are run. The people that are passionate about doing IT in that context are far and few between. Since it's seen as a service job, it forces a lot of people into other disciplines after a couple of years behind the helldesk. Many IT shops also fail at communication. There is a lot that we do behind the scenes and no IT shop i've been at is doing a decent job constantly reminding everyone why they are there. Organisations need to know what improvements IT is working on and how it will better serve their needs, and they need to get excited by it. People get excited when Apple introduces new technology, but they get less excited when suddenly they can log in everywhere with the same password. Market that better. IT, Operations, DB and Co. will resent you for asking for things when they are already busy putting out fires, fulfilling all your other requests and being the whipping boys and girls of your organisation. Google is a notable exception because their IT department is far better managed than most. Make sure all your technical service departments are tightly aligned with the mission critical things in your org and make sure management is shielding them from requests that get in the way. The more focus the techs have on core things, the faster they get done and suddenly the more spare time they have to help you get your project done on time too. Time management and business planning is key here. Finally quit this 'for the CEO' or 'for Alan' mentality. If someone's computer fails, it should be replaceable within a couple of hours. This special person who's making a larger salary than you should understand better than any one else, never be dependent on a single point of failure to run a business. This doesn't mean a CEO has to be a tech genius or your star programmer an IT genius. They should just be smart enough to ask their IT department ahead of time 'what do i do when my computer fails?'. |
Your opening paragraph says it all though. When developers talk about how difficult programming is, I always explain IT like this:
"Imagine you have N sections of code you have to support that someone else has written. They may/may not be documented, whatever documentation you have may not even be accurate, you can't change the, and somehow they have to work together even though they probably weren't designed to do that. Oh and there's a good chance there's no one to call for integration help, but you're responsible for tactfully explaining this all to executives & end users without ticking them off, even though they'll only call you when it's broken."
It's too bad that the perception around IT's role has only gotten worse now with the cloud.