This company implements a concept called "One IT," and it sounds great to a pilot fish working there -- at least in principle.
The idea is simple: "If there was a big IT problem, all available people from all IT departments would scramble to put the fire out," says fish.
"But since there were only two IT departments at our site, design and manufacturing, and manufacturing was having problems every other day, this really only worked out for them. As they would say, 'It's production, you know!'"
One day fish's site gets a visit from the VP in charge of IT for manufacturing, and everyone in IT gets 20 minutes' notice to attend a "feel good" meeting with the exec.
The VP asks how One IT is going. Fish, who's responsible for IT on the design side, asks if they can get some help implementing a new system.
VP immediately turns to his secretary and dictates a memo to fish's boss at HQ -- stating that manufacturing IT resources will never help on fish's project.
There's stunned silence from fish and his team. Then the stillness is finally broken by a member of fish's staff, who congratulates the VP on a success at a remote factory where a former member of fish's team helped solve a major problem for manufacturing.
"The VP turned purple and ended the meeting," fish says. "It turned out he was really at our site to privately present a plaque to this person, who had been asked if he could find out why there were low production rates at a Chinese-based testing site. It took him 20 minutes to pull the data and produce a report showing that when a tester head failed on a four-head tester, it would not be fixed until all four heads died and the tester wasn't able to work at all.
"I guess the VP's behavior didn't go over well with his boss, the CIO."
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