I have not worked at that many different companies, although I've been in the industry for a while and I've seen the day-to-day workings of many workplaces. A recurring theme in many of these workplaces, which always surprises me, is the failure of the information technology to meet the needs of the users on a day-to-day basis. I've often asked why this is such a problem. Is it because it's hard to know what users want? Do the solutions not exist? Are they too expensive to implement? Is it not a priority?

I've concluded that businesses are not serious about IT. By not serious, I mean that they treat it as a nuisance, or that, in general, the least possible effort is expended on providing employees with the tools and technologies that would help them do their jobs. What would taking IT seriously mean?

• Problems with the computer infrastructure would be treated like an emergency. When users go without email for 4 hours, this is often shrugged off like it was inevitable. What if the heat went off in the middle of the day for 4 hours, or the water stopped running for 4 hours? It would be just about as disruptive to business, but it would be treated like a crisis.
• Solutions would not just be, "Don't let anyone do anything". Most big business seem to have an IT policy which is unconcerned with stomping on users legitimate needs in the interest of preventing possible problems. For example, the prevalence of ridiculously aggressive email filters that don't let any zip file in or out. Yes, it stops a certain class of viruses from spreading, but it gets in the way of transmitting legitmate files probably 10 times for every virus stopped? Why not just not let people use computers at all? Then you'd have no computer problems.
• Intermittent problems would be dealt with instead of glossed over. Have you ever worked at a company where a critical server went down once a week and instead of just fixing the problem, it was rebooted? That's what I'm talking about.
• Users' requests would be taken treated as requirements instead of burdens. Most IT policies are a top-down affair, with some sort of group deciding which capabilities will be offered to which users, and how those services will be delivered. Unfortunately, since the people who make the policy are generally the people who have to implement it, the decisions often lean towards "easy-to-administer" instead of "good-for-users". When users complain about policies that interfere with their work, or offer alternatives for software or hardware to help them do their jobs more effectively, the message is "but that will mean more work for us!". The result is that large gains in user efficiency are sacrificed for much smaller gains in IT efficiency.

That last point is the most important. The IT staff often has a conflict of interest because they want to reduce their burden (which honestly is hard to blame them for, given that IT departments are often dramatically understaffed) but by doing so they create a suboptimal environment for the day-to-day users.  Businesses need to recognize this and provide a better mandate for their IT staff. Besides raising staffing levels and constantly trying to improve the staff, management needs to judge the IT department on user satisfaction. Those two steps would be a serious commitment to  IT, and ultimately, they can help improve morale, and make the business more competitive.