Who are all these IT people??

Most folks outside of IT do not really know what IT does and how diverse it has become. Very often business users wont even know who you are, at least until something breaks and then everyone knows your name. As an IT Pro or soon to be Pro, there are many roles to choose from for your career.

Lets take a look at a typical IT department:

Executive
It all starts with the CIO who sets overall IT directives and budgets based upon input from the business units [I.E. Marketing, Finance, HR, and the other members of the executive team]. Often reporting directly to the CIO is a purchasing or financial agent who manages procurements and adherence to the budget.

Infrastructure
The groups that make up the infra teams provide the foundation of IT services by helping the business be more productive, keeping systems secure and available and enabling the mobile workforce.

• Network Service - Manage & maintains network switches, firewalls, routers and data circuits connecting all the office to each other and the Internet.
• Storage team - Manages & maintains large SAN and NAS storage devices which can range from a few hundred terabytes to petabytes.
• Unix/Linux team - Supports all Unix or Linux servers which other groups applications or services reside upon. [IE Apache(web) servers, SAP, Oracle, DNS, compute services]
• Wintel (Windows) team - Supports all Windows servers and typically most Microsoft back office services [IE Email, Active Directory, DHCP, Print & file services, etc]. This group typically also maintain virtual environments (public & private clouds)
• Helpdesk - Deskside and phone support for the end user's desktops, laptops, tablets, Macs and other devices as well as the software installed.
• Telco - Sometimes included as part of the networking group, the Telco group maintains voice circuits and the PBX (phone system).
• NOC - The Network Operations Center monitors systems and network connections health status as well as batch jobs(automated tasks, backups and data transers). Alerts are triaged by criticality and response actions include tier 1 remediation on up to escalations to on-call engineers or network carriers and vendors to report outages.

Applications - The groups that make up the Application teams provide solutions which are directly used by the business. Such solutions may be an E-Commerce application, Reporting app, Supply Chain, ERP, CRM, Financials or HR solution. Applications are what help the business generate revenue or provide effective and timely information to business decision makers. Depending on what application platforms a company uses will determine what specialized groups are needed. Some examples are:

• Sharepoint - A key collaborative web portal which requires .NET developers and SQL DBAs. In smaller organizations, the Wintel team is often tasked with maintaining Sharepoint.
• SAP - The market leader in business solutions with very specialized and in-demand IT Pros. This solution often has multiple teams to support it [Oracle, Basis, Reports, B2B portals]
• Web Development - Once known as web masters, Web admins maintain internal and external web pages using IIS or Apache. This group will work very closely with Marketing, Sales, HR and Executives and has expanded greatly with maintaining social media.
• Application Development - Companies often develop their own applications or expand upon 3rd party or open source solutions. DBAs and programmers will round out this group.
• DBA - Database admins may be members of other applications groups or simply be their own small group. A DBA will typically specialize in one solution, most common are SQL or Oracle. Other examples are DB2 and Sybase.

Security, Program Office, Risk Management - This group is called many things but each with the same purpose; ensure the companies data is secure. In some organizations, this group may report to the CIO and others may elect to have the reporting structure outside of IT to avoid any conflict of interest. The skill sets remain the same for the group members.

• Audit team - performs internal audits to ensure everyone is adhering to corporate policies. Some companies may also need to be in compliance with Sarbane-Oxley(sox), HIPPA, PCI,  ISO####, SSAE16 and many others.
• Change Control - Tracks change requests/approvals and communicates these to the business and the other IT groups.
• Disaster Recovery - Maintains all documentation in regards to DR and conducts regular tests (normally at least once per year). Corporations have learned over the years that disasters do happen and if they are not prepared to recover within a certain timeframe, a disaster can be terminal for the business.
• Risk Management - Security team which analyzes corporate risk such as hacking threats, DLP (data loss/leakage prevention), and corporate IT policy. This group sometimes includes internal e-hack or penetration testers or uses 3rd party services to identify risks and plan counter-measure requirements. Risk Assessments, Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and Continuity of Business (CoB) each start with the Risk (security) team.