IT people, Consulting vs non-consulting work/companies

[Pruzhany]

Originally Posted by Adhom

Actually, companies that treat their IT as just cost centers instead of vehicles for growing the business will get left behind. There is a reason why a lot of non tech companies are becoming tech companies. Banks for example.

An example would be Capital One. They haven't been left behind but most of their positions are outsouced & insourced. The extremely few US professional IT jobs are for the most part telecommuters. Their campuses look like ghost towns. They don't have to send chunks of the outsourced positions out of the country as the one's from India are now in the US as insourced labor.

Originally Posted by vision33r

Companies that treat IT as cost because they do not want to reinvent themselves to drive their business as a platform. Once your IT becomes as platform, many businesses are looking for help in these areas in all industries.

Capital One is a company that they sent their IT too as for example they a few buildings that are completely filled with servers. The only people actually onsite on these buildings FT are security officers.

[Serious Conversation]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

I wish more people in IT realized this. They get hung up on crap like "nobody else can do my job" (no, but someone can learn it), "that's not my responsibility" (it's SOMEONE'S, so why isn't it yours), etc.

At the end of the day we cost the company money. Period. And the company is always going to try to find ways to cut that budget, usually through layoffs and offshoring/outsourcing. The best way to reduce your risk of being laid off is to be tremendously talented in your subject area (an area important to the business's strategy), to the point where they KNOW they'd struggle hard to replace you with "freshers" from India or 3-5 people in Manila who require excruciatingly detailed instructions. If your area of expertise is important to them, that can sometimes be enough to keep you safe.

Everything I do is some sort of back office or support function for another department.

If I'm not billing the hours somewhat accurately, no one is going to have any clue what I'm working on. If no one has a clue what you're doing, why keep you around? If I have twenty trouble tickets and two larger projects I've billed to, it's much easier to see where that time is going and why I need to be there.

[furboll]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

I wish more people in IT realized this. They get hung up on crap like "nobody else can do my job" (no, but someone can learn it), "that's not my responsibility" (it's SOMEONE'S, so why isn't it yours), etc.


At the end of the day we cost the company money. Period. And the company is always going to try to find ways to cut that budget, usually through layoffs and offshoring/outsourcing. The best way to reduce your risk of being laid off is to be tremendously talented in your subject area (an area important to the business's strategy), to the point where they KNOW they'd struggle hard to replace you with "freshers" from India or 3-5 people in Manila who require excruciatingly detailed instructions. If your area of expertise is important to them, that can sometimes be enough to keep you safe.

I agree that IT cost money and does not generate revenue for an organization. I don' think that is eve the function of IT in most capacity. IT is about information and providing access to/protecting, etc... such information.

"that's not my responsibility" is something I find myself having to do more and more because a lot of departments and/or organizations try to pawn of task on IT that has nothing to do with the job at hand or the industry as a whole. So what happens is we end up being responsible for task that someone somewhere else in the organization is supposed to be doing.