For a long time, IT got filed under "cost center" — a necessary expense, a line item to be trimmed, the department you call when the printer breaks. I understand how it happened. But it's a framing that quietly damages both the business and the people who keep it running.
Because in almost every modern organization, IT isn't the printer department. It's the nervous system. Every order that gets processed, every customer record that's looked up, every payment that clears, every message that moves between teams — it all runs on systems that someone in IT designed, secured, and keeps alive. Cut the nervous system and the body doesn't get a little slower. It stops.
When you treat that as a cost to be minimized, you get exactly what you optimize for: the cheapest possible version of the thing everything else depends on. Underinvested infrastructure, overstretched people, security treated as optional until the day it very much isn't. The savings look good on a spreadsheet right up until the outage, the breach, or the burnout that takes real capability out the door.
The better framing is that IT is where the business's ability to operate actually lives. Not a support function bolted on the side, but the substrate the whole operation runs on. That reframe changes the conversation — from "how little can we spend on this" to "how much does the entire business depend on this being done well." Those are very different questions, and only one of them leads anywhere good.
If you work in IT, understand your own value in these terms, and help the people around you see it too. You're not the cost of keeping the lights on. You're the reason the lights, and everything connected to them, stay on at all.
– Serguey Shinder
