For someone at their first corporate position, I was quite nervous about how to successfully write about the role of IT in a corporate organization structure. Rather than set myself up for failure, I’d like to discuss the role IT has taken in jobs past, my current position, what an ideal future would look like. Something like how the Energy Department describes its CIS:
“The mission of the Office of Corporate Information Systems (CF-40) is to plan and manage the design, development, operation, and maintenance of the Department’s Corporate Business Systems program and projects; to identify and implement business process automation initiatives; to provide technical support for legacy systems operations and maintenance; to provide technical support for web design, development and maintenance; to manage cyber security and enterprise architecture activities; and to serve as the liaison to the Chief Information Officer for Information Technology services.”
As a Global Digital Marketing Specialist, technology is an important part of my daily work. But that title is the newest and most specific of my recent career. Casting back three jobs ago, I started as an Assistant to our Director of Event Entertainment and Marketing at The Actors Gymnasium before I was eventually made the Marketing Manager.
When I started in 2012, the nonprofit arts organization was in a crisis. Their first Executive Director had just left, and with him much of the day to day knowledge of the technology system he had set up. We were in pretty deep trouble. Each day, we had messages pop up on our computer notifying us that our server was nearly out of storage. Sometimes to save an image, I would need to delete something from our files. And boy were they a mess. Duplicates and triplicates abound. Each person in the revolving door of office managers had developed a new system of storing our operational data which didn’t resemble its predecessors and rarely glanced at legacy information. At the same time, we were notified by the performance ticketing service we used that they had been hacked and we needed to notify a list of people who were affected. Additionally, the web designers, who had only communicated with our Executive Director, were asking us what design decisions we had made about the new website they were building us.
Luckily the universe was looking out for us. The president of our board of directors had a husband who was an IT whiz. For months, he came in near-daily for free to help us rectify the situation. In many ways, he acted as a network administrator for us.
“Network administrators and engineers have a clear understanding of your organization’s IT structure and network needs. They not only maintain and monitor networks, but also design them to support future growth. Typical responsibilities include designing and implementing physical and wireless networks, ensuring performance and integrating new technologies.” (Administrator, N. H. P., 7 IT Roles Every Modern Company Needs to Stay Competitive)
First, he discovered what the situation was with our server. We didn’t actually have one. What we had was a consumer external hard drive product meant for a home. He quickly got us set up with a proper server, gone were the days of having to delete files to save newer ones. He realized why our internet service was so terrible. Again, we were on a personal, not business account, which was not set up to handle the bandwidth of 6 people using it simultaneously.
At the same time, I was tasked with notifying our patrons who had possibly been hacked. This often meant looking through the records of the database we currently used, as well as searching the records downloaded from the previous systems we had just before shutting them down. Because of this process, I took it upon myself to reorganize the shared file system as well as institute a process of updating current and past patron records. I also began working with the web design firm on creating our website, taking an online class from the local community college on WordPress.
As my time went on there, in the five years that I stayed with the company, no permanent IT position was created. After we had maxed out our time with the Board President’s husband, each new office manager was hired based on a resume that included IT skills. They very much acted as an IT Project Manager.
“They bridge the gap between vision and execution, breaking down high-level strategies into actionable steps. IT project managers coordinate across departments to ensure projects align with business goals. They oversee every aspect from budget and scope to task management.” (Administrator, N. H. P., 7 IT Roles Every Modern Company Needs to Stay Competitive)
When I left, daily reports were generated with the help of this person keeping everyone up to date on how they were lining up their strategy against real goals. They had also created new processes to help cut out the middleman and as my then boss said: “let computers do the work of computers and people the work of people”.
It was tough then for me to move onto a company that I knew would be very behind the technological times. Boy was I underestimating the issue. Though there are a myriad of examples of just how bad the situation was, I think the one that stands out the most was that each week, the HR manager would supply each hourly worker with their “new” punch card that she then collected and manually entered into an excel spreadsheet, using her typewriter behind her to fill out certain preprinted reports. Despite being a highly profitable family business with 300 employees, the company utilized one freelance IT guy who mostly showed up when the 20-year-old digital sign stopped working. This freelance IT person acted like a Hardware Technician.
“Hardware technicians repair and manage servers and computers. They’re responsible for a wide range of computer and network maintenance including installation, upgrades, troubleshooting, security and support to maintain high-quality networks and computer systems.” (Administrator, N. H. P., 7 IT Roles Every Modern Company Needs to Stay Competitive)
The box office was using a version of Ticketmaster that was so out of date that it was no longer supported by them, written in the black background, green font popular in the software of the late ’80s and early ’90s. For multiple technologies, the company had decided to buy spare parts when the technology was discontinued by its creators. That was done for the 20-year-old digital sign, the punch cards for the time “sheets” and more. As a marketing professional, it was incredibly frustrating to hear that we captured a wealth of information from paper surveys that theatergoers filled out, but once the results were shared at a business meeting, the surveys were trashed, and nothing is done with the information. The greatest thing I did for my company during my time there was to access our records in Ticketmaster and pull email addresses for attendees of every show that we could, going back to the early aughts. From that, I was able to take their email list of 30k and bring it to 101k, many of them from visitors who had attended within the last few years. This basic act of data maintenance showed up as increased ticket sales and subscription renewals almost instantly.
At my current job, I am one of the 6,000 employees located at 200 sites in 50+ countries. We have a department named Business Information Services (BIS) that includes a 24-hour Global Service Desk (GSD) made up of help desk support.
“Help desk analysts are the most visible IT roles in a company. They’re the frontline of IT support — answering, troubleshooting and resolving technical issues to keep employees productive and customers happy.” (Administrator, N. H. P., 7 IT Roles Every Modern Company Needs to Stay Competitive)
We should be great right? Not so much. The GSD requires you to fill out a form that rarely asks you questions that are helpful for the person who is supposed to provide support. While being 24 hours, the GSD usually takes a day to respond and then support provided doesn’t stay with one person who can track the progress of the issue but bounces around to “whoever is on the desk at that time”. If you don’t respond to an email sent by the GSD about your problem within 48 hours, the ticket is automatically closed. But no big deal, our on-site IT guy should be able to help yes?
Since our IT person hasn’t been trained on many of the systems we use, such as Tableau, any issue that arises with that program usually involves a length of time just explaining what the program does eventually getting to what the problem is and when asking them for any thoughts, a suggestion that they don’t have the necessary knowledge but will forward the issue to someone who does. In short, no matter what you do, when you run into a problem with your technology, you have bounced around from silo to silo usually until you figure out the solution yourself sometime later.
It’s also unsurprising that a company that fired its entire marketing department years ago because “why do we need marketing people when we have a sales staff?’ hasn’t seen the wisdom in making IT part of a proactive strategy rather than a reactionary solution. The lack of a visible IT presence effects productivity. Not having them integrated into the fabric of everyday work means that many departments are creating new processes for their work when a company-wide process could help knowledge transfer easily between them.
A prime example was the fact that my Director asked me to purchase access to Tableau and teach myself how to use it so that I could run monthly marketing analytics reports. Both BIS and our procurement department helped us do so. It was only months later when I was dealing with a reoccurring issue wherein trying to open a database in Tableau deleted it, did someone in BIS choose to inform me that BIS had previously decided to no longer support Tableau and had already moved everyone over to Microsoft Power BI.
I’m nervous as I take ownership of a project introducing a new MarTech solution to our department. Will we get the support we need as we train and implement this new technology? What pre-existing processes exist elsewhere in our company that we could borrow from so that we aren’t constantly reinventing the wheel? Who will troubleshoot the inevitable tech glitches we will have during important crunch time? Will the system be connected to the existing resources we don’t know about, including the mysterious data lake that is oft referenced but no one actually has access to?
“IT departments are experiencing tremendous changes as their roles expand to impact customer service, sales, and even business strategies. As a result, organizations are increasingly turning IT into a driving force in all aspects of business.” (Newman, D., The Changing Role of IT In the Future of Business)
So, what would I like to see? I would like to see a robust IT department that resembles the pentagon seen in the lecture for this module. I believe that we need to have someone look at our department from a Resources Management perspective to assess what we already have that can be improved upon and what needs to be replaced as far as technology and processes go. Additionally, an assessment of our current level of Risk Management is important to determine before we go forward. They can help us assess what our Value Delivery can be. Together we can compare that against our existing Strategic Alignment for business goals of this fiscal year and beyond. Setting up a process for Performance Measurement will help us determine whether our strategy is helping us reach our value delivery. Together our IT experts can take our efforts to a whole new level, pushing us to be on the cutting edge of innovation and renewing our company.
Citations
Administrator, N. H. P. (2019, March 8). 7 IT Roles Every Modern Company Needs to Stay Competitive. Retrieved from https://www.newhorizons.com/article/7-it-roles-every-modern-company-needs-to-stay-competitive.
Corporate Information Systems. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.energy.gov/cfo/services/corporate-information-systems
Newman, D. (2016, July 28). The Changing Role of IT In the Future of Business. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2016/07/26/the-changing-role-of-it-in-the-future-of-business/#4858d292525d.
Wass, W. (2019, September). Course Interview. Retrieved from https://canvas.northwestern.edu/courses/101846/pages/course-overview-and-textbook?module_item_id=1274132
MarketingMichelle 