In my opinion IT people are often great at communicating clearly and with what in other parts of business would be called vision. They think ahead and see conne

In my opinion IT people are often great at communicating clearly and with what in other parts of business would be called vision. They think ahead and see connections between processes and systems that non-technical management (even the process owners) miss. They can see the dot on the wall and deliver a program brining you there. However, and that’s the big gripe, each and every one IT proposal I see costs money. It not just costs money, everything costs money, but it raises the long term average cost per unit. Even when we are dismantling ancient and totally non functional systems, the TCO of the modern solution is higher than the previous. Look I’m here on HN, can program a bit, understand quite large parts of the tech stack. But not why even highly capable IT-staff and management whom I have confidence in can’t seem to explain their contribution to the basic underpinning of business: average cost should go down over time and with scale. (Advice about how to talk about this with IT people is more than welcome! A lot of organizational distrust and poison sadly follows from this.) One of the more current examples is that IT-staff forgets that they are 2-3x more expensive per FTE than general workers. So when I see a plan and calculate how much middle management should save in reduced workload thanks to plan X both sides don’t like the outcome. The end of the day picture that companies exist by grace of customers willing to pay for your product (and cost loading!) is lost at that moment.