[nradov]

Could this difference between development and IT be due to a differing need for managers? It seems like modern agile development methodologies have reduced the number of managers necessary by automating things that managers used to do and by making individual contributors more self organizing. You still need some project and functional managers, but not as many as with when following a waterfall methodology under a command-and-control structure.

By contrast it seems like IT still requires a lot more active management to be done well. If you've got to install a new corporate backbone network or consolidate a bunch of servers you need top-notch managers actively driving the projects forward or else you'll end up with a huge mess.