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Infrastructure provide everything you as an end user needs to work, they provide the network infrastructure, dns/dhcp, the windows infrastructure, active directory, user accounts, domains, wins etc, NAS and SAN storage for your personal and departmental drives as well as finally the messaging and printing infrastructure, your email/calendar and a printer to print to.

Development/application support write or modify bought in applications for your use, their job is to make sure that when you click submit on your rail ticket request form, that the information is submitted to the right people as expected. They support both your internal applications like railticketrequestor, and the bought in ones like business objects, websphere or bankname.com.

So when you here we need to make IT more aligned, what do we mean? Is it not that we want the following:
One voice – one strategy for IT
One IT service – I pay for the servers and the application
One group to speak to – accountable service managers
Responsive to business needs and transparency with costs

Is the issue not though that IT and development are in separate business lines?  That development typically resides within equities for example, writing/supporting applications that equities need, allowing both infrastructure and development to walk in different directions.

If your development community were driven by the infrastructure CIO, might they not consider open source? Could application support not become an extension of the infrastructure support, on a first/second line level anyway?

By having business line specific development, doesn’t this prevent you from allocating the best development resources to the most difficult tasks?

By transferring development into infrastructure, you can switch to service provisioning model, “We need a currency trading system, what’s the cost…”

Since development typically still resides within a business line, IT failure reports become political statements as much as they do incident reports, “the server was available” (it couldn’t do anything but it was physically powered on and not reporting errors), when they should be – “IT failed you, next.”.

Whether its application or infrastructure the user typically doesn’t care, the causal factor is immaterial, what matters is that it’s resolved/worked around and dealt with to prevent it happening again.

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