FLM

IT, from liability to asset

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. Nowadays IT is as ubiquitous in a working environment as water, electricity and a toilet. Unfortunately a lot of managers interpret this ubiquitousness of IT as it also being a utility. It is often seen as a liability. For this post we studied 3 organograms which popped up after a Google search and describe in 500 words what is (probably) wrong or right with them in terms of the role and place of the IT department. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

Many modern companies tend to view IT as a utility like water or electricity. While that might be true for some parts of IT (the parts in the lower end of the IT stack like hardware), from the software level and up, IT is just too complex to be treated as a utility.

Then again, it also depends on the type of business to which extend treating IT as a utility will affect you. It is not hard to imagige businesses that only need email, an office suite, a website manager and some other basics to function succesfully. Those kind of businesses can treat IT as a utility. Online cloud services like Google Apps or Zoho provide all and more of what they need. Please note that in those cases, the company does not need an IT department.

So maybe we could state that, if you have an IT department, it can be assumed that IT potentially plays an important role. Because if you only need services of the level like the ones mentioned above, why do you have an IT department at all? I think it needs no clarification that organisations, whose business depends on creating and managing knowledge, like many organisations nowadays in the developed world, can be tremendously helped by IT. Then, if IT is an important part of the success of your organisation, why do you treat it as a liability (an expense account) rather than an asset?

Let’s have a look at three organisational diagrams and reflect on the place and possible role of their IT:

#1

#2

#3

1. Marketing and IT under 1 manager? That’s a very bad idea. This is a knowledge firm (high number of consultancy departments) so you would expect them to have at least a separate IT department. But no, the guy that prints the brochures is also responsible for your Windows hotfixes.

2. I can hardly find the IT department (Chief Infocom?) and it doesn’t seem to be important enough to be mentioned in one of the core business lines (Onshore,Offshore,Exploration). This would be probably a oil or mining company, traditionally without an IT department maybe. Could be that IT is so embedded in the organisation that they don’t need a separate department.

3. Very good, looks like a learning institute (VLE admin) and the IT department seems to be in the proper place: they have a Learning Technologies manager right in the middle of their core business and on the same level as Course Development and Instructional Design.

Having separate IT departments is not a bad thing. It can be even the way to go to cut costs on the lower end of your IT stack. But to be a successful company and get the most out of your IT deparment investments (hardware, software and humanware), you’ll have to start viewing IT as an asset to your organisation and open that asset to all your employees. Based on the charts above, I would most like to work for organisation #3.

sources of the organograms:

• http://uniexgh.com/about/organogram.php
• http://www.ongcindia.com/organogram.asp
• http://www.virtualcampuses.eu/images/1/13/Organogram_hibernia.jpg