My rebuttal to that disgusting article.

 I am the network admin for the company I work at and I'd like to share with you an I.T. point of view on each point you brought up.

1) If every manager had the ability to authorize projects involving I.T. assets, it'd never work.  Every department in the company depends on I.T. to have working systems and always wants more functionality.  That's great but we also have all the other systems to integrate with and also make sure that we have enough resources to run your new underwater basket weaving system.  In short I.T. needs to be involved to make sure that what your doing is feasible from a systems admin point of view.

2)  If you company is anything like our's, our I.T. department is 1.2% of the total workforce.  Unlike everyone else we have support every single department which means every single user.  If you want more face time, hire more staff, every company I've worked for is understaffed and overworked.  Our department puts in more overtime then any other to keep the place running smoothly.

3)  See point number one.  You want new functionality but don't want to pay for it.  I hate to tell you this, but software and hardware cost money, if its a specialized software, labor costs for consultants also come into play.  The regulations for public companies keep changing, hence we have to keep changing to meet them. 

4) Again refer to point number one.  Different departments need new software all the time or want upgrades to existing packages.  Hence the projects never end until the users stop requiring new items, being understaffed means longer until project completion.

5)  The helpdesk is exactly that, help.  When you contact them they are level one, our mantra is if it takes longer then 8-10 minutes to solve, pass it along up the chain and help the next person.  You could refer to them as the secretary of the I.T. world.  It's usually an underpaid entry level job.  Just like you wouldn't make a new mechanic overhaul a car, the helpdesk staff is unlikely to fix major problems.  Please be realistic.

6) I hate outsourcing and we try to handle all of our problems internally unless needed.  I concede this point to you.

7)Running email for hundreds if not thousands of users is much more ecomplicated then running your own inbox at home.  Not to mention spam filtering, dealing with other company admins, different server techonolgies, and a host of other interoperability issues arise. 

Also why in the world would your I.T. staff be teaching you about myspace and other social networks (or blogging or any of that other non work related material).  That kind of material has no place in the business and it's not I.T's place to help with personal internet usage unless it's business related.

8)Our I.T. department regularly completes upgrades (on time and on a shoestring budget) only to find the user has new needs or demands.  Users generally will find some obscure problems and instantly the project is deemed a failure.  I.T. has good news, you just need to listen and ask rather then criticize and tell.

In closing I'd like to ask you to consider this.  When's the last time you thanked your I.T. staff for taking care of a problem.  We regularly complete major system overhauls/upgrades with little or no thanks from the end users.  The majority of I.T. professionals agree it's a thankless job with little recognition from non-technical users.  Most systems professionals do this out of sheer enjoyment of working with technical objects and processes. 

I can't remember the last time I heard the sytem was running too fast or "job well done on the company wide rollout of system xyz" or even a simply thanks for that matter.

I think that the original post drew enough heat so they have now posted a new one on the eight reasons to love IT.  It is basically a counterpoint to the initial article, and it is interesting to see how fast this went up following the original hate IT post.

Todd