IT as a business (unit) is a bad idea

6 years ago, Bob Lewis wrote at InfoWorld an article that has since then attracted my thoughts around that topic. Here are some key statements from the article:

• "When IT acts as a separate, stand-alone business, the rest of the enterprise will treat it as a vendor. Other than in dysfunctional, highly political environments, business executives don't trust vendors to the extent they trust each other."
• "Chargebacks are an attempt to use market forces to regulate the supply and demand for IT services. If that's the best a business can do, it means the business has no strategy, no plans, and no intentional way to turn ideas into action."
• "Nobody in IT should ever say, "You're my customer and my job is to make sure you're satisfied," or ask, "What do you want me to do?"
• Instead, they should say, "My job is to help you and the company succeed," followed by "Show me how you do things now," and "Let's figure out a better way of getting this done."
• "Where did the standard model come from in the first place? The answer is both ironic and deeply suspicious: It came from the IT outsourcing industry, which has a vested interest in encouraging internal IT to eliminate everything that makes it more attractive than outside service providers."

I'm still convinced that this is actually the way to go. Why does it not happen on a larger scale? Why do Businesses still separate the two so strictly? I believe that it's mainly an issue of choosing the simplest organizational model possible - which is Business here, IT there. It's simpler to allocate costs - and be able to clearly blame IT why it is so expensive. Which reminds me of some more excellent articles written by Tom DeMarco et al. Aaah, webbing the Internet...