On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Brian Hechinger wrote:

> Somebody at Volvo made a very wise choice a while ago to break Volvo's
> IT department off from the company and make it a stand-alone company.
> basically fore-seeing the decline of the trucking industry.  so now
> there are three Volvos: Volvo/Ford (cars), Volvo (trucks), and Volvo
> IT (take a wild guess)
>
> Volvo IT is contracted by Volvo and Volvo/Ford to do all their IT
> work.  but they aren't stopping there.  since Volvo IT is a consulting
> firm they are going after other contracts anywhere they can get them.
> i can't give out any more information than that though (not due to an
> NDA, but rather, that's all i know)

This is actually pretty smart on a number of levels.  For anyone that's
worked in a company where the IT group is "just another dept" then you
know the horrors of being caught in the middle of a variety of generally
incompatible departmental and political agendas.

Breaking off IT into a seperate entity allows the IT group to bill the
various depts for the IT services.  So now your forcing these different
depts to actually budget their IT needs...  "Okay Mr. VP Marketing Bozo,
so you want to setup a cluster of spam servers?  Fine, that'll cost you
`X' dollars per month for the equipment purchase and the maintenance.  I
sure hope you have `X'/month*12 in your budget." >:-)

Nothing stops bullshit in the business world like good old-fashioned
ACCOUNTABILITY.

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
       Good always wins over evil, except in gym class.  -- K.