In my experience, thats what distinguishes between good and bad IT departments. Companies which looked at IT as a cost center tended to have bad IT service, whe

In my experience, thats what distinguishes between good and bad IT departments. Companies which looked at IT as a cost center tended to have bad IT service, where as those who viewed it as a value-added service had good IT service. I use to do IT consulting and bounced in and out of dozens of companies. Some had no IT support, others had us augment their IT team. The best IT department was at a company where there was about one IT worker for every three employees. A ratio typically unheard of, this company spent greatly on IT as everything had to run smoothly. IT was at an employees desk within a minute if any trouble arouse. They were very profitable of course. The worst companies spent as little as they could on IT. One literally asked me if I could setup their Windows NT 4 box because their Windows 2000 Server was having issues. This was only a few years ago, and they didn't want to buy a new Win 2008 box. Eventually they did, but it was months of pain and plenty of downtime before it happened. Everything else in the company smelled of cheapness too, all in a bad way; Penny wise, dollar foolish. Also, if the IT-to-employee ratio is really low, like 1 per 200 employees, and systems aren't locked-down super tight, IT HelpDesk can constantly be in a position of stress with more requests than it can handle. This is typically the reason for long delays. It's like any service center, really. If you want good service, you have to pay for it. Call up Apple's tech support, and then call up Lenovo's. Both do the same thing. But one is really really good, and the other terrible. Guess who views their tech support as a cost center and who doesn't? (Hint: You can tell if you don't see a tech support phone number on the front of their tech support webpage.)