Comment IT Keeping the Company Together (Score 1) 562
What is the relationship of IT to all the business units in your company? Where I work, I think we have an excellent arrangement and IT/business units work together very well.
Where I work, IT is critical to making the company work and keeping it all together. So start with the needs of the business units you serve, solve them in the best way, and your executive types should have big smiles on their faces. On the flip side, if you are making decisions that impact other parts of the business, and you base those decisions on anything other than the needs of those parts of the business, then it will look very questionable.
For a "good" example, IT here also recently built my business unit some custom databases that streamlined the work we have to do every day, and they are hero's for it.
For a "bad" example, IT here recently did a huge software and hardware upgrade to a different database system that we use. However, they didn't work enough to make sure that the work done was based on business needs. Executives are furious at the time and money they spent on it, and the people that use the systems are not any better off after the "upgrade"
So if you were in IT in my company and an executive wanted to sit down and talk with you to find out what can be improved, you would want to prepare something that shows how you are affecting the connection of different groups in the company and how you are improving effectiveness within the groups. From that basis, you could move on to suggestions about incremental improvements, or total changes and what effects those would have on the groups involved.
In the end, if you do all that and your Execs just don't get it, then you might want to start looking for companies that understand the value of IT.
Where I work, IT is critical to making the company work and keeping it all together. So start with the needs of the business units you serve, solve them in the best way, and your executive types should have big smiles on their faces. On the flip side, if you are making decisions that impact other parts of the business, and you base those decisions on anything other than the needs of those parts of the business, then it will look very questionable.
For a "good" example, IT here also recently built my business unit some custom databases that streamlined the work we have to do every day, and they are hero's for it.
For a "bad" example, IT here recently did a huge software and hardware upgrade to a different database system that we use. However, they didn't work enough to make sure that the work done was based on business needs. Executives are furious at the time and money they spent on it, and the people that use the systems are not any better off after the "upgrade"
So if you were in IT in my company and an executive wanted to sit down and talk with you to find out what can be improved, you would want to prepare something that shows how you are affecting the connection of different groups in the company and how you are improving effectiveness within the groups. From that basis, you could move on to suggestions about incremental improvements, or total changes and what effects those would have on the groups involved.
In the end, if you do all that and your Execs just don't get it, then you might want to start looking for companies that understand the value of IT.
