The Information Technology

In its earlier days Information Technology was considered a tool for managing the business and it did well to prove its worth. Businesses across the globe embraced the revolution eagerly and were benefited enormously. Overtime, the role of IT has been changed and so is the size of IT. IT departments started from one room with a few technical people and thrived to multiple floors with thousands of staff, not to mention that some have grown out of the geographical boundaries and span across continents. This growth has changed the way businesses were run. A department which started as a support function is now at the centre of every strategic decision and thus impacts everything from budget and planning to operations and finance. IT also happens to be the most daunting of places in any organization where people are used to pressures, unexpected failures, long working hours, job related stress and much more. This partly is because of the nature of work which is understandable. If the daily routine and amount of pressure that any ordinary IT worker has to bear is made known to prospective IT employees I am sure half of them would change their careers. Another factor that adds to the already disgruntled IT is the lack of support from other departments. IT has assumed the role of running the business, which is jeopardizing the very core nature of it. IT has to improve continually for the organization to benefit from it; once it is left with the barren task of running the business it loses its basic instinct, innovation. When normal job descriptions of IT staff include correcting mistakes of other departments, there would be no new work and no productivity. This picture is still incomplete without the confused role of top management, the decision makers. They have their own version and vision of IT. Over the past decade, IT has seen many revolutions resulting in high cost of maintaining a modern and efficient department; both in terms of infrastructure and human resource. In any given large scale organization, the investments (especially inorganic investments which put businesses under a lot of pressure) done on IT outsize the investments done anywhere else. The top managers are forced to believe that IT department is a star department and hence they expect the department to outperform every other department by assuming their roles as well. Another factor is the change impact. Usually any change in the business impacts two departments. First, the department where the actual change will be implemented and second, IT which is going to implement that change; sometimes the change impacts IT more than the actual department and hence the top management expects IT to take control of the change despite lack of proper business knowledge. This again results in miserable lives of IT personnel. Of course, none of the above happens in an organization where IT is the main business, usually in such companies, the top management comprises of technical guys who know about these factors and create an atmosphere where everyone does his own work. The pace at which IT as a field is growing is exhilarating, but it sure comes with its own peculiar problems which can be solved by accepting it as a special field with special requirements.