Centralized Computing Means Happier IT Staff

As enterprises expand, stretching out across the globe to include remote offices, employees’ living rooms, airplanes, and coffee shops, you’d think that the role of IT might have expanded, too. Security, connectivity, application delivery — all these issues come up when you’re dealing with a distributed enterprise, and IT departments should be thinking big about ways to help business cope with a changing computing environment. Instead, many IT employees find themselves stymied by everyday user-support annoyances and confusing chains of command.

“During the course of my career, I have reported to a team leader who reported to the office manager who reported to a regional office VP; to an IT manager who reported to the CFO; to an IT manager who reported to another IT manager who reported to the CFO; to an IT manager who reported to a committee; and to a department head who wasn’t sure who he reported to. Whereas most departments know where they are positioned within a company, no one seems to quite know what to do with IT.” (The Blog of a Certified Geek)

In many cases, the business side’s inattention to IT results in diminished resources, reduced scope, and a lot of the same old-same old. Instead of turning to IT for innovation or problem solving, businesses relegate their tech departments to fire fighting duty — despite the fact that it simply doesn’t capitalize on tech employees’ talent or experience. These situations frustrate everyone involved, but seldom does anyone take steps to rectify them:

“No one I’ve ever talked to admitted to liking the fires at work. They put urgency and stress into our days. They put us in a position of solving a problem that in many cases we didn’t even know existed. And because of the urgency, often the problems are averted (or minimized), but the root cause never is addressed – meaning you fight the same fire over and over again!” (Putting Out Fires)

IT departments were born for something more than just putting out fires. The twin challenges of constrained budgets and expanding technical resource demands require IT departments to turn their energy toward helping businesses run faster, more effectively, and more efficiently.

Desktop support staff may balk at the idea of centralized computing — after all, if there are no machines on the desktop, what happens to their jobs? Answer: they get a lot more interesting. People can concentrate on projects that demand more intellectual firepower than what’s required to shut down and reboot a frozen PC. Centralized computing enables IT to refocus and to get back to doing what they do best: developing and implementing strategies that facilitate both the short-term and long-term growth and prosperity of the organization.