Good examples and your points are valid - especially the last paragraph, which I think is IT's responsibility whether they are dealing with a customer or a colleague. Frankly, I'd be thrilled if the internal people at most companies were held to standards you're holding paying customers to.

As a manager in a service desk, I always have to remind everyone that the metrics are the start of the conversation, not the end of it. It's easy for people to substitute the number for the reason why you measure the number, and as soon as that happens, stupidity isn't far behind. All numbers can be gamed, so it ultimately comes down to someone actually paying attention to how well IT is serving the needs of the business as judged by the key decision makers in the business.

The fact that most people substitute "help desk measurements" for "IT measurements" freely in their minds is a sad commentary on the state of IT/business relations. IT should be doing a lot more than resetting passwords and replacing keyboards - they should be helping the business develop products and services that lead to success for the company.

You make many excellent points, yet I have to strongly disagree with this statement:

"everyone in the company is treated like a customer"

Unless you provide IT services to someone outside of your company, you're not working with customers, you're working with colleagues (simple test - how much is the person you're talking to paying for service?) This is a very different dynamic as a customer has less responsibility than a coworker - other people in your company have to follow policies and adhere to guidelines that customers don't. There's no real difference between someone asking for a new computer when their current system is perfectly fine and someone asking HR for an equal amount of money, yet the second request gets laughed out of the building. The real customer is the person who can make the decision whether to outsource IT or not.

Fixing this perception would get us a long way towards a better relationship between IT and non-IT parts of the business.

Now THAT is a great show title. Somebody get the Robot Chicken guys working on this...

This would only be the case if the RMBS consists of whole mortgages. My understanding is that each mortgage was split into various income streams, with a stream getting the first x% of dollars obtained either through payments or foreclosure, one getting the next y% of dollars, and so on. Therefore, if your tranche only gets the last 10% of the repayment of the mortgage, getting less than 90% through a default where the property resale price + payments made falls more than 10% short means this tranche is worthless.

In your example, the sale of that RMBS at 70 cents on the dollar should have forced an immediate markdown of assets to show the worth of similar tranches at that value, but they are not forced to sell because of this. If the markdown forces them to sell assets to meet margin calls, there are sovereign wealth funds and other investors with money that would be willing to buy something below what it is worth so they should be able to sell if for market price which would be 70 cents or higher.

The fundamental issue is that these banks are considering tranches to be level 3 assets that do not have a market price so they can claim they are worth whatever their models tell them, whether their model is close to reality or not. These institution's models are so far from reality due to faulty premises that even a single sale considered to be non-distressed of these assets would require writedowns that would wipe out all of their capital. Their inability to sell these securities is in reality a refusal to accept the actual worth of these products, so they want their rich uncle to pay an inflated price for them.