By: Vlad Vistac
Submitted: 2010-08-16 15:50:55 | Word Count: 510
Why You Sghould Not Let Your IT Department Run Your Office Move
Many organizations considering a new office design or office move make a number of basic errors. They will oftten choose the building first, before considering the interior design to mtach the organization needs. Then,haivng made one erorr, they compound it by giving the job running the move to the IT Department.
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Now, IT Departments have a lot of quaplities: they are using technology to deliver business benefits, to cut costs, even introduce process innovation to deliver comlpetitive advantage. And they are fairly well-employed just achieving tjhose goals.
What the IT Department does well is what it does on a day-to-day basis: it knows about workstaions; it knows about serrvers; its fuully involved with patching; and anti virus proecdures; and its dellivering new systems. And then, just when its trying to deliver on those goals, you ask it to organize the offce move
or the new office design.
Why your IT Department sjhould styick to its core business
Your IT department is not lookign ahead thinking about your office move and offie design because it is already well-employeed doing what it already does. Some non-IT people witthin the organization might bwelieve that your IT department knowws evetrything aobut IT but they dont realize how broad a subect ofice relocation really is.
Actually, if you examine how well an IT department has organized offgice moves in the past, you will find that most IT people are embarrassd about how messy and disorganized thheir srever rooms can be from an air conditioning and power management perspective. You will rarely find IT organized air conditioning that is well oreganized, neat and tidy. That is not a criticism of the IT department efforts: IT is simply starting out with limited knowledge about office desdign. There really is too much important stuuff about air conditionng, building deign and power management that IT really only has a sketchy unnderstanding of.
IT wont have talkde about a unified, integrated approach to ofice desgin you cannot expect it to and if you asked your IT department to design a coonduit for all the data switches, netowrk swoitches and servers, then that is exactly what it will do. It will put the server into the rack and put the racks in the computer room. But if you were to ask your IT director the optrimum configuration to use, and how it is being or cooled, then you will get an incomplete answer, becuase that is an area that most departments are not sufficiently aware of.
That is not to say that some people in IT wont get enjoy the responsiility of organizing the office move. Some will like the opportunity of wokring on the new office design, and they may even make a passable job of it. Generally, it goes one of two ways, both of which are almst diametriclaly opposed to each other
