Engineering and IT: Bridging the Gap

The relationship between IT departments and engineering teams in organizations is often marked by friction due to differing objectives and resource constraints, with IT being viewed as a bottleneck by engineers seeking more advanced tools and resources. However, the advent of cloud computing has begun to alleviate this tension by democratizing IT resources and shifting budget control to engineering managers, allowing them to select the hardware and software solutions that best fit their needs. This shift transforms the traditional capital expenditure model into an operating expense model, requiring engineers to consider project costs while designing workloads. As IT managers focus on ensuring the security and integrity of cloud solutions, both departments can collaborate more effectively, as demonstrated by a successful case where an engineering manager found a cloud-based solution for high-performance computing needs. With public cloud services growing rapidly, the focus has shifted from whether organizations will adopt the cloud to how they will utilize it, enabling innovation to thrive without being hindered by traditional IT processes, provided there is sufficient operational budget.