Perhaps you don't remember O'Neill. He was the speaker of the House during the Reagan years. What brings him to mind is his political mantra: "All politics is local." O'Neill knew that a successful politician needs to be close to his constituents, engaged in their issues, attentive to their concerns and seen as a force working in their behalf.

What's true for politicians is true for IT professionals.

Both business unit managers and technology consumers are big fans of decentralizing IT. They want it carved up by geography, by lines of business, or some other scheme, with control passed to the local senior business manager. This mania for local control isn't just an affirmation of O'Neill's mantra. It seems to be simple human nature.

We all tend to feel cut off and ignored when the people we rely on or care about become more distant physically. Move out of town, and relatives will feel that you care less about them. Get elected to office and then spend all your time in the capital, and constituents back home will feel that they are being ignored. Centralize IT in the home office, and IT's customers are sure to feel underserved. This feeling even seems to affect decentralized organizations. Unless you are right here, you are nowhere.

Experience shows that the issue is not centralization or decentralization, but disenfranchisement. But when IT staff become engaged with their users, both the image of IT and the perception of the services it provides go up. After all, all politics is local. Unfortunately, centralization is a long-term trend that's unlikely to lose favor at a time when cutting costs has become so important. Senior IT managers cannot spend all their time on the road, visiting customers. But they can empower a special group of people to do exactly that.

The concept of IT account managers sprang up in emulation of technology vendors that discovered that customers could be kept happier if technical experts, whose job was to focus exclusively on customer issues, were sent into the field. Each account manager (also called a customer service manager, IT liaison or relationship manager) supports a region, a line of business or some other IT customer segment. They are seasoned IT professionals who are knowledgeable in all of the IT services provided to their customer base. Their job is to spend considerable time with users, understanding how they use technology and resolving problems.