Back when PCs just started entering business they were cheap enough so that they could be purchased by low-level managers. We soon had a dog from every town (more like 50 dogs). It was a support nightmare and cost far more than the simple cost of acquisition. Now scale that up to multiple content management systems, multiple MRP systems, multiple . . . You get the picture? It was now costing big bucks to host and maintain and interface all these disparate, expensive enterprise systems.
They changed the rules. No business unit could buy s/w or h/w without going through architecture. We had a process where we would put together a team of users, IT folks, Finance, Procurement and occasionally others to perform evaluations and reach a consensus on which to buy. I was focused on life-cycle management of information (and it’s digital doppelganger, data). But we also had teams for desktop, network, etc.
The whole reason for the existence of architecture was to reduce the overall cost of IT by reducing redundancies, planning transitions, looking into the foggy future, etc.
It’s interesting for me to hear the other side of this story. My side, abbreviated, is:
The great thing about PC’s when they first came out was that we could just buy what we needed to get the job done. We didn’t need to get IT involved, so we didn’t have to wait for approvals and then wait for setup. We got things done. We could make changes to our environment ourselves to make things more efficient.
Then IT realized what was happening and inserted themselves. Now we had to buy from IT-approved vendors, which were the ones that were literally kicking back money to IT. IT justified this as reducing the company’s budget, but it was a shell-game - instead of allocating money directly to IT, IT was taking a cut of the higher prices every other department was paying. Then cloud services came along and were were able to find applications we needed on the web, yet again by-passing IT in order to get things done. And now IT’s trying to insert themselves into purchase decisions of those applications…
One thing that’s interesting, is that the above story was carried across 4 different companies. Yet, how IT worked and changed was seamless across the companies, so my conclusion is that almost everyone was moving at the same pace, and IT was continuously trying to catch-up. And the tension between groups doing direct work and IT was always the same: from our POV the IT group was not considering itself a service organization to other groups in the company as much as it was trying to make itself more efficient and cost-effective. I believe an overall company perspective, however, would be that you want the groups doing the things that your company makes money off to be efficient, and to have IT do whatever they could to support that, not to overly regulate that.
Sorry for the side-bar.