Read all about how awful your IT department is but ignore the note of condescension in his voice. I take the article personally since I’ve worked in IT for nearly 15 years. I have met the people the author talks about — those nasty IT people who (as Scott Adams coined) are “preventers of technology” — but the problem did not start there. At one point in history the people who maintained the infrastructure were working arm-in-arm with the people running the business, or the people running the business maintained their own systems. Then the companies became large enough and the technology became complicated enough that management decided to separate the technology maintainers from the business maintainers. That separation instilled the business people with a sense of entitlement. “We make the money. We touch the customers. We are above.” IT is viewed in many places as a service akin to building maintenance. Still, the author wonders why IT people are so snotty and so public about it. If facilities employees had as many blogs as IT employees this could have been a very different book.

If you feel the same way as this author does about your IT staff I would give you the same platitude I give in almost every situation: “change starts within”. When I started my IT work I was in the same building with the people using the infrastructure. I was sandwiched between the customer service department and the sales department. Anytime they had a problem it only took them a dozen steps to poke their head in my cube to get a response. Most of my success however was with the tech support department who were in another building altogether, but they invited me to planning meetings and would often call or email me before they requested a change. They would explain their needs and bring me into the process as a partner. I wasn’t a warehouse where they could order widgets and have them delivered without having to share designs.

As the years have progressed the company I work for has gone from a few thousand domestic employees to tens of thousands employees around the world. My department has been (IMO) the most successful of all the IT departments because we insist on being near the business. We have weekly meetings with them that force them to reveal their plans and goals, and force us to commit to delivery time frames. In this way we have been able to achieve success, and (I hope) the business sees us as an asset and a partner.

I realize that our IT department is, if not unique, at least better than most. We are often recognized as being very efficient and committed to seeing the company grow. We are only able to achieve this success because we have business partners who see us as partners and keep us involved. If you want your IT department to be an asset, you need to treat them like the intelligent forward-thinking people they are. As soon as you have a design that you think might impact IT, bring them to the planning meetings or send them an email to keep them in the loop. Stop treating them like mechanics and janitors. It is easier to have them involved ahead of time than it is to have them fix the machines after they break and clean up the mess.