If you're a restaurant chain and you have your own IT, presumably it's for a reason. You're providing your own POS systems, you're providing a website for customers to order from. A new release can improve efficiencies in a restaurant, or wreck them. A new release can mean the difference between me being able to order from Papa Johns (literally 1 mile from my apartment) or not (because of my zip code, they think I'm in an area they don't service).
For banks, it's the same thing. It can be external: my bank added a feature that let me enter and see projected expenditures and incomes so I can see my future balance, it's an effective aid to my budgeting. It can be internal: Like a POS system, making it easier or harder for tellers or lenging agents or others to do their job. Giving them more accurate and up to date information with reports generated daily or down to the minute, instead of the historic weekly or monthly batch reporting.
Car manufacturers have control systems developed by IT, same results as above on a new release.
Nobody says that what the IT department does cannot be useful. And it is not about being internal or user-facing. Marketing and customer support are also considered cost centers.
Which is not reasonable in either case. Also, is marketing really considered a cost center in most businesses? I would see that put more in line with sales.
Customer support is certainly treated as a cost center, but it oughtn't be. Mary Poppendieck (author of this article) has a good example in one of her books where the customer support center improved profits by being able to aggregate and identify the majority of customer complaints. This led directly to improvements in infrastructure and delivered systems that reduced overall corporate costs (less rework, customers were happier, more sales).
Those are valid points. My intention was not to discuss the subject but to reframe the discussion. I can see advantages and disadvantages in considering some departments in the company to be providers of services to the rest of the business. But I guess an appropriate, but cynical, definition would be that cost centers are the departments where you can slash costs while hoping there will be no impact on the business...
A bank can release a new well made app that lets people apply for mortgages easier, which gets them 10% new mortgages worth $100 billion, which can easily be tracked back to the dev team that made this amazing app.
Zara. A lot of it's growth can be attributed to fast flow of information from retail stores back to design team and the operational excellence due to a tech savvy management.
