IT centralization gone wrong

Dear Bob …

Our IT support was recently moved to a centralized organization. In our organization this is a small group of people who keep the network running, install and maintain the desktop PC’s, handle disk shares, backups, etc.

What is interesting is that we basically just moved the people to a different organization. Having the same number of people doing the same job makes it hard to understand how we have saved any real money. However, we have given up control to a centralized group. What does this mean?

1. When the a server broke last week, the centralized group had control over fixing it. A week later this wasn’t done, so the people at our division are doing things by hand, or in some cases not doing it at all.

2. Our Exchange server got moved off site, so performance has suffered, and services, e.g. archiving, need to be negotiated with the central group.

3. Our straightforward ticket management system got replaced with the arcane system used by the central group. They wanted to put 300 people through a one hour training class on how to use it, and management balked because the old system required no training, and why did they want to spend 300 person hours on such a waste of time and money? Turns out the new system is so tricky to use that it might have been a good idea after all.

4. Trying to get support for a relatively simple problem on my laptop required several phone calls to different people who all kept pointing at other people, until after a month of waiting, and numerous requests to our local IT support manager, somebody looked at my laptop with NetMeeting and fixed the problem in 10 minutes.

Your thoughts?

– On the receiving end

Dear Receiver …

Not having been involved in the process, it wouldn’t be fair for me to comment on either the wisdom of the decision or the implementation plan. Some thoughts:

First and foremost, give central IT a chance. Even if the decision was brilliant and the plan was good, this wouldn’t be the first time that launching a new business process resulted in some rough spots. A bad launch doesn’t prove the concept is wrong.

If centralization wasn’t accompanied by a staff reduction, a number of possibilities occur to me. They are:

• The goal is staff reduction, but not yet. Corporate IT is giving everyone a chance to perform. Future reductions will target the weakest employees.

• The goal is staff reduction, but not yet. Corporate IT is following the McDonald’s approach to bad news: McDonald’s precedes its price hikes with a sale. When the sale is over, nobody notices the prices are now higher than they were before the sale started.

• The goal isn’t to economize, but to increase consistency, deal with compliance requirements, or improve overall manageability. This also explains the move to centralized incident management, even though the central system is much nastier than the one you’re used to.

• The goal isn’t to economize. It’s to consolidate political power by gaining greater control over staff, processes and functional responsibilities. It wouldn’t be the first time corporate won and the business units lost in a political contest.

Be of good cheer. The usual outcome for something like this is that the business units pretend to use the centralized service while quietly developing guerilla IT support so they can continue to do business.

– Bob