Pros

Very understanding and flexible about time off for personal reasons.

Cons

Business Areas do not take impacts to other business areas into account when creating new processes. Manual work arounds are common. Many cause problems in other business areas. Systems to support these processes are therefore jury-rigged and difficult to modify (or even understand in some cases). No one has the big picture from a systems perspective and IT, while expected to have a big picture, is considered a drag on any project, so is never told enough info to get the big picture. IT is also hampered by severe resource constraints.

Finally, in recent years there have been so many mandatory shut downs (take vacation or no pay) that it is impossible for a new employee to accrue time off. Also, they do not match 401K.

Advice to Senior Management

Give IT enough resources to be effective, and re-enforce support for IT by discouraging non-IT projects that impact multiple business areas. Encourage business areas to work with other areas PRIOR to business process changes and each area should step up to own thier own business data and how the systems they use represent that data and the associated business processes. NOTE: Enough IT resources means to have at minimum 2 resources(primary and backup) for each production system.