What is it about IT departments that they seem so often to experience unproductive relationships with senior management? Why do successful corporate senior management teams, which manage every other aspect of their organization with great skill and talent, turn into confused novices when it comes to managing IT?

For that matter, how come it is so hard for IT managers to communicate with the senior management team? And anyway, if IT departments are so bad, why are they tolerated and even given enormous spending power? Most importantly of all, how can IT managers learn to avoid being the victims of such phenomena, and how can senior managers learn to work with the IT team so that the organization can avoid all of the torment and pain?

Senior executives have grown accustomed to the notion they are going to have an IT department that will continue doing important work and will not go away

Those questions, in a nutshell, epitomize the IT dilemma, says Technisource Management Services president John Baschab, who has recently completed co-authoring the second edition of a book examining the symptoms and causes of waste, inefficiency and underperformance in typical IT departments.