Comment Yes you should, and engineering will fight you. (Score 3, Interesting) 214
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:
- Do you want your broadcast engineers researching, acquiring, training and maintaining non-broadcast systems like accounting and payroll software, CRM, and email? Is that the best use of company resources?
- Do you want your broadcast engineers implementing security policies for your corporate workforce?
- What about maintaining non-broadcast hardware like printers for HR and new monitors for the folks in finance?
- Not to mention traditional desktop support. You going to send the guy who troubleshoots the satellite up-link to fix the malware on the VP's laptop?
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.