Do you need an IT department?

[Wubbalubbadub]

I woke up this morning, reading this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56130187

 

It says HR on the title, but it goes on to say IT department.

The owner says, IT departments don't make people happy, so I don't need them.

 

I'm actually amazed a company that big can function without an IT department. Unless they just out source??

 

Curious what others thought of this.

[DJ-1701]

I would hate to think of the state of their IT...

[LukeRowberry]

How long before the headline ‘Octopus Energy hit by ransomware - what does this mean for your data’??

[DrCheese]

There's just no way they are functioning without an IT department at some level - They must be outsourcing bits of it

[penfold]

That article makes no sense. It says no departments, but then people are expected to learn how to do things to support themselves? So even if you don't have a traditional "in-house" department, someone is still doing the work. The work doesn't just go away because you don't have a dedicated name. Someone must be doing HR Tasks and IT support - Inhouse or outsourced:confused: Edited February 24, 2021 by penfold

[hardtailstar]

"It is now valued at more than £1.4bn ($2bn) by private investors, with permanent staff owning 5% of its shares."

 

This suggests to me that they must be outsourcing or contracting.

 

What do they do if someone forgets a password?....... Probably dont have them.....

[Theblacksheep]

Can't wait for when managers bring up "no IT department company" as an example and not the "minimum wage is 70k company".

[localzuk]

To be honest, that all sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. The whole point of a HR felt is that they are external to the usual management structure so are not directly involved in any issues that come up - they're somewhat unbiased.

 

Not having an IT dept is another weird one. It is near enough impossible for a company to comply with all its legal requirements without dedicated staff. So my guess is that they just outsource it.

 

I think the problem were seeing here is actually one the BBC causes far too often. Articles with far too little detail being published. It's basically clickbait.

[TechMonkey]

Playing devil's advocate, how often do we gripe about staff not doing the simple things that they could do partly because management don't give us the backing? Sounds like they are getting to be to learn what they need to for their jobs and to keep on top of their learning. All power to them.

Octopus Energy are a tech based company so it could be that they don't have an "IT Department", but they have IT people that do stuff. If they have gone all out Cloud or online systems then it maybe that staff get a standard laptop and access what they need via the browser.

 

I don't see it as impossible or unworkable, especially if they have a CTO that knows his stuff and can direct the company in the right direction. As ever, I wouldn't judge their IT provision unless I knew more as it maybe it works very well and just isn't a model we are used to.

[Sonic007]

If you decide it is cheaper to outsource, you'll regret it later down the line. Look at the BSF projects where in some cases you had to phone Ireland to then get a Northgate technician out. That time frame is never going to work in a classroom learning critical situation.

 

I saw it many times, technicans being brought in house again. They will soon moan if they cant get hold of someone so having onsite support is vital.

[smurfomatic]

As I've been an Octopus company for a few years now, I have to say I've not noticed any major issues in relation to them not having a specific IT department.

 

If you take a look at their blog https://octopus.energy/blog/ one of the top row of articles is a "spotlight on Karim El Khazaani, Front End Dev Team Lead" so they've definitely got some IT guys there!

 

EDIT: scroll down a bit and they've also got a tech internship

[DJ-1701]

Playing devil's advocate, how often do we gripe about staff not doing the simple things that they could do partly because management don't give us the backing? Sounds like they are getting to be to learn what they need to for their jobs and to keep on top of their learning. All power to them.

Octopus Energy are a tech based company so it could be that they don't have an "IT Department", but they have IT people that do stuff. If they have gone all out Cloud or online systems then it maybe that staff get a standard laptop and access what they need via the browser.

 

I don't see it as impossible or unworkable, especially if they have a CTO that knows his stuff and can direct the company in the right direction. As ever, I wouldn't judge their IT provision unless I knew more as it maybe it works very well and just isn't a model we are used to.

 

I certainly see it as way more likely they are not fulfilling legal obligations, but yes I must admit the actual instant panic and call IT mode would be negated for simple trivial issues and in first instance to actually reboot...

 

[Jcx500]

Looking on Linkedin there is some IT People on there mostly devs and a CTO

[TechMonkey]

The whole point of a HR felt is that they are external to the usual management structure so are not directly involved in any issues that come up - they're somewhat unbiased.

I feel this is a somewhat romanticised view though. It is what we hope HR is but the reality is HR is there to protect the company, they will do what is best for the company. So if the managers are properly trained and can deal with situations and issues why not let them get on with it?

 

I imagine it is also a product of careful hiring. Like the company that made the decision to never fire anyone. Everyone said it would never work but their interview process is full on as they realise that anyone they choose they are stuck with so really put the effort in.

[Norphy]

They must have someone who handles IT stuff. Not having an IT department is fine for a small company where you're in one place and everyone knows everyone but once you get past a certain size it's just not practical and it's safe to assume that Octopus have long exceeded that size. Even if they are outsourcing the management of their ordering, billing and web services they still have endpoint devices which will need software installing, operating systems set up and suchlike. Even with systems like DEP on the Apple side and Autopilot on the Windows side, they need someone to set that up, manage it and get the devices into people's hands.

 

It's possible that sort of thing again gets outsourced so saying "Oh, we have no IT department" might be technically correct (The best kind of correct!), in reality it just means you're paying someone else to do it for you.

[PlantHead]

My guess would be that when the BBC says IT Department, they mean Helpdesk and maybe second line support.

Those are area's that a lot of companies already outsource or expect their staff to be able to fill. IT is really more 3rd line with the idea to minimise all 1st/2nd line support tasks.

 

Edit: it is really an article saying. There is no need for an IT dept because I expect my staff to be able to support their IT themselves.

Edited February 24, 2021 by PlantHead

[strawberry]

Not impossible to do. Just need a CRM that could be operated by a 5 year old with plenty of restrictions. Use automate to enrol devices and turn them into a kiosk and have a monthly visit to reenroll or swap out devices.

[TechMonkey]

Well, as an interesting though experiment how would we do it? If you joined a company as CTO or Director of Bytes that wanted no IT department, how would you do it? Lets ignore it being a school as that is an outlier really.

 

My first thoughts are everything cloud. If email, records, everything are online then it cuts the risk of ransomware and makes cross compatibility easier. This also means devices are easy to manage as you just don't. Staff can use their own device or any device we chuck at them and they just log into the company portal. No downloads needed if things are kept online, so no worry of data breaches. Cuts MS fees, cuts MDM costs. Keep an MSP on hand if a device dies and do a swap or tech goes out to fix it. No worries about info on the device so they can just flatten it. If they are leasing their HQ then infrastructure could be managed by the building management or outsourced to MSP.

Any custom services hosted with a provider so no need to maintain our own infrastructure or engineers. Leaves developers to get on with what they need.

Training can be internal or outsourced and staff encouraged to self discover. Induction would cover the main systems they use.

 

Have I missed anything obvious?

 

If something like this is how they have done it then it would explain why they were so agile at dealing with the lockdown and one of the few companies that carried on regardless.

[jthompson]

My main issue coming away from that article is the over-egged anecdote at the end. "Boss mildly underestimates junior employee with general life experience so decides to not employee qualified specialists".

 

As others have said, not having in-house departments just means that they'll be outsourcing things like domain security, email service management and payroll. Even if everything is running from turnkey cloud systems, you're still going to need somebody within the organisation with a good technical level of understanding to decide on what policies are going to be in place to protect the users from themselves. Running email and cloud documents on default settings for 1200 employees will almost certainly lead to data breaches, I'd have thought.

 

I don't see that HR or IT are there to make people happy anyway. Why was that a factor?! Maybe he's one of those people who's swallowed the myth that IT people are uniformly intransigent and difficult and that everybody hates them.

[free780]

This might explain why Octopus keep putting prices up despite saying it would be cheaper moving to them.

 

I guess if users can self reset passwords and go cloud first. You need DHCP WiFi and switches so someone's got to put that in and maintain it. Granted at the moment it's probably WFH. I can't see this happening in education.

[Ditto]

What an appalling piece of journalism! @localzuk has it nailed - clickbait! In the video clip, nowhere does the CEO Greg Jackson say they don't have an HR department. It's not a comment backed up in the written article. The same is true of the statement of no IT Department. Even if they do exist under another name, it's irrelevant. Unfortunately, that's led this thread down a route based on bad journalism. What Greg Jackson does talk about is making use of staff creativity, taking responsibility, removing bureaucracy and having a passion about your work to provide the best customer experience. The article mentions training to enable staff to have the skills to do their job more effectively. A discussion on those topics would be much more interesting.

[jthompson]

It would certainly be interesting to know more specific detail: what does making use of staff creativity actually mean in practice, for instance? It sounds nice and warm in the abstract, but it also sounds like a bit of a minefield. If roles and responsibilities are essentially being loosely applied rather than recruited on the basis of more explicit job descriptions, presumably the organisation has to then work harder to adjust when certain 'goto' people leave?

[paulkerton]

As I'm moving and making a decision on energy provider soon, thats Octopus off the list. The boss sounds like a complete blowhard who has no idea that yes, he does have HR and IT people, he just doesn't call them that.

[psydii]

They are smaller (user count) than we are and have a far far simpler IT requriements (a CRM, + Google/Microsoft, their web front end, and maybe a lan with wifi).

Two people could easily handle everything bar the web front end.

Quite possible that the CEO backed by some of the dev team are all there is.

Compliance would be pretty simple - have everything handled by the CRM and tweak the appropriate knobs in Google/M365. Their DPO and CFO would be calling the shots there.

CRM Support training and development would be outsourced.

The platform the Web Front End runs on would be outsourced to AWS/Azure

Printing is easy to fully outsource.

Network Infrastructure (assuming they actually have physical offices - they could have a fully WFH environment) could be provided ans supported as part of their managed services contract for their office building.

 

Remember they do not come with legacy IT as bagage. They could probably be run the whole show on Chromebooks + a bit of AWS.

[jthompson]

Maybe it's like the 1970s Dutch football team playing Total Football, where each member seamlessly shifts between roles as required in any given moment.

 

Disclaimer: I neither play, watch or are particularly interested in football, and I'm probably attempting to use humour as a response to feeling threatened by the idea of IT roles as we know them becoming redundant.