These things are doable, but it may take a culture change, first.
We had a CIO, who litterally started at the bottom of the totem pole. She started as admin and rose to the number 3 position of the enterprise. So she knew what it was like to be in the trenches...and she carried that with her, all the way to the top. And when she got to the top, she made it her mission to get things changed. In the executives' eyes, IT was an expense to be managed--a necessary evil. Well, she took great offense to that notion: "Someone has to answer the phones and make coffee." She researched IT's accomplishments and the strategic value we brought to the company's bottom line, and she put it in the other execs' faces. She made it crystal clear, that despite reducing IT budgets and other market strains on profits, IT was actually augmenting revenues via cost-savings. She made IT a stragetic partner--No project gets green-lighted without IT involvement, from executive planning, all the way down to end-user support. As a result, full-time IT now has better training, better equipment, bigger budgets, and earned respect.
We've implemented all these suggestions, or more correctly, our clients had us implement all these suggestions, because we didn't have time to build cables and replace mices. "We need someone from IT to attend the next project kick-off meeting," they said. I started out, here, running cables, managing user rights, and loading CDs to build individual machines for users. Now I give "expert testimony" to people who make more in an hour, than I do all day. And the coolest part: They are actually listening!!
