Most my career, over 15 years, my job role was around Information systems organization. I had to deal with various departments within IT, such as walk-up centers, Infrastructure, Enterprise architects, Project Management Office (PMO) & Enterprise Applications. Each department helps business significantly. For example, I go to walk-up center if I have problem with my laptop or any applications installed in my laptop. Enterprise application team hosts all applications, from ERP, CRM to office tools. Infrastructure maintains the hardware (servers) and network.

              However, I do see there is some gap between IT organization and business partners. Modern companies implement few processes to reduce the gap.  One such process is having annual / quarterly budget planning meetings where business partners talk to IT liaisons (Business system analysts and Project managers from PMO) to plan the upcoming projects and budget allocation. This helps IT to understand where business heading towards and plan and provide solution to help executives to achieve their goals.

              Latest technologies like Data Science and Machine Learning models, by using historical data, helps the business to slice and dice the data and analyze key metrics and provide predictive / prescriptive suggestions.

              As part of cost cutting initiatives, when few job roles shifted to other parts of globe, audio & video conference sets which IT enables plays significant role to reduce the gap between teams in different part of geography. Data governance and security policies which deployed by enterprise architecture team helps company to save intellectual properties not only from hackers, access can be restricted to only relevant internal employees within the company as well.

In my opinion, IT is well positioned to understand business, enables advanced technologies, helps organization to save cost, improve efficiency and reduce lot of manual effort to run the business very effectively and successfully.