Heather Has Two IT Departments

As companies grow departments get created, break off, and get divided up. At our company, we have ended up with two IT departments. The simple dividing line is, one department handles the network and one handles things plugged into the network. There is some overlap in this when it comes to things like the mail server, but they divide it up somehow.

There is, effectively, a third IT department dealing with a company wide project and several micro IT departments, but these two are the official owners of all that is IT. These two groups set IT policy and rules that we try to evade.

I suspect that there is a low intensity conflict between the two groups. If you ask one department about something for which the other department is responsible, and despite the seeming clarity of the delineation between the two this is surprisingly easy to do, you might hear back from them that the area in question is not theirs. Or they might just read your email and deleted it. They will never forward it to the right person in the other department.

This animosity has worked out for at least one person in our building. We have two IT people here. Both IT departments at HQ seem to agree that we only require a single individual here to cover our IT needs. However, the two IT people here each report to one of the two IT departments and neither department seems to want their person to be the one let go.

So we continue to get decent IT service here as neither of the people on our site act as though they belong to either IT group, they just do what needs to get done.