It is easy to bash the IT department. The land of no and slow. A roadblock rather than a resource. A group it feels easier to work around than with when the business needs something now. Susan Cramm captured the mood years ago in a piece titled “8 Things We Hate About IT,” and the complaints she catalogued have not aged out. If anything, the pressure on IT has only intensified.
Here is the part most of those complaints miss. Nobody actually hates the people in IT. They hate what it feels like to get work done across a dozen disconnected systems — the manual handoffs, the spreadsheet tracking, the email approvals, the request that disappears into a queue and resurfaces three weeks later. That is not an IT-attitude problem. It is a systems problem. And it is exactly the problem Kinetic Data exists to solve.
Kinetic is an enterprise workflow orchestration platform. It acts as a modernization layer — software that sits on top of the systems an organization already runs, orchestrates work across them, and gives users one clean experience, without ripping out the systems underneath. That distinction matters for everything below, because most of what people “hate” about IT is really friction between systems that were never designed to talk to each other. So here is our take on the eight complaints, why each one exists, and what actually fixes it.
1) IT limits managers’ authority
The complaint: governance rivals the tax code and inhibits innovation.
Bureaucracy can absolutely be overdone. But the review process usually exists for good reasons — to avoid buying technology that duplicates what is already in place, will not integrate with existing systems, or quietly creates a security and compliance exposure. The cost of buying the wrong system is rarely modest, regardless of the sticker price.
The real fix is not to remove governance. It is to make governed work fast. When approvals, provisioning, and routing run as orchestrated workflows across your existing systems, governance stops being the thing that slows requests down and becomes the thing that lets you say yes safely.
2) They are missing adult supervision
The complaint: the CIO is unreachable and the people one level down cannot speak the language of the business.
That is a leadership and skills gap, not a technology one, and it is real. The antidote is straightforward: IT leaders who can frame technology decisions in business terms, and a pipeline of people being trained to do the same.
What if we invest in our people and they leave? What if we don’t, and they stay?
The investment compounds. The neglect compounds faster.
3) They are financial extortionists
The complaint: there is always some emergency — Y2K, SOX, HIPAA — that costs a fortune.
IT does not write the regulations. It is responsible for keeping the organization’s systems compliant with them, which is a different and largely thankless job. As for the broader cost: yes, IT is expensive. The infrastructure, the integrations between systems built by different vendors in different decades, and the talent to keep all of it running are genuinely costly. So are surgeons and auditors. We pay because the cost of not paying is worse.
Where money is genuinely wasted is in over-customizing backend systems and building one-off integrations by hand to bridge the gaps. A modernization layer reduces that spend directly — you orchestrate across systems instead of re-engineering them, which means fewer brittle custom builds and less dependence on expanding licenses you do not need.
4) Their projects never end
The complaint: in-progress projects are always 90 percent done, and finished ones never have the agreed functionality.
Nothing in a serious business is ever “done.” Products get redesigned, processes get refined, expectations move. The goal is not a finish line; it is the ability to keep extending what you already have without a rip-and-replace every time the business shifts.
This is precisely what incremental modernization looks like. Instead of multi-year replacement programs, you build on top of the systems of record you already run and add capability in increments. The work is never finished — but it ships continuously, and each release stands on the last instead of restarting from zero.
5) The help desk is helpless
Technology problems can be genuinely hard. When a request crosses a phone, a SaaS app, an identity provider, and a record sitting in a system from two acquisitions ago, there are a dozen places for it to break. But there is no excuse for support that is slow and opaque by default.
The fix is not heroics. It is orchestration. Give people a self-service portal for the routine requests, route everything else automatically to the right place, and make the status of every request visible end to end. Self-service portals and request routing are table stakes — every vendor offers them. The differentiator is being able to orchestrate the request across every system it touches, so it never stalls in the gap between two of them.
6) They let outsourcers run amok
Almost no organization does everything in-house, and almost none outsources everything. Hybrid is the norm — core functions stay inside, specialized work goes out. That is sensible. The risk is coordination: when a single employee request has to move across internal teams and multiple outside providers, the seams are where it breaks.
A workflow orchestration platform manages those seams. It coordinates work across internal systems and external providers as one governed process, with a full audit trail of who did what and when. The number of providers can keep growing. The chaos does not have to grow with it.
7) IT is stocked with out-of-date geeks
The complaint: IT is still wrestling with email while everyone else has moved on.
Two things are true at once. First, IT needs people who can connect emerging technology to real business problems — and if a team lacks them, the answer is to hire them. Second, the “old” technology is often the technology the business runs on. A large share of the world’s transactions still touch a mainframe at some point, and the systems of record holding your most critical data are rarely the newest ones in the building.
That is the entire argument for modernizing on top of existing systems rather than replacing them. The dependable old systems keep doing what they do well. The modernization layer gives users a current experience on top — no migration, no multi-year replacement, no betting the business on a rebuild.
8) IT never has good news
The complaint: no matter how hard you work, there is never anything to celebrate.
Then the work is not being done right. When Schneider Electric revamped its online IT service request system, the internal chat lit up with messages like “magnificent design,” “bravo,” and “this is excellent.” That is what good news in IT looks like — not a quieter help desk, but employees who actively notice that something got easier.
The path to that is unglamorous and repeatable: take the requests people dread, orchestrate them across the systems involved, and hand back an experience that just works.
Where AI fits — and where it does not
No honest take on IT in 2026 can skip AI, so here is the disciplined version. Build with AI. Run with Kinetic. AI accelerates the design of workflows and participates inside them as runtime steps — it can classify a request, extract a field, recommend an approver, or summarize a case. What it should not do is execute the work, because execution is where you need repeatability, governance, and an audit trail.
AI advises. Humans decide. Workflows execute.
The execution stays deterministic — the same inputs produce the same governed result, every time, with a record of it. In a regulated or government environment, that is not a nice-to-have. Kinetic is not an AI platform and ships no AI models; it gives the AI you already use the right job inside a workflow you can actually audit.
So, no — we don’t hate IT
Large organizations are complicated. Friction between their moving parts is normal. But most of what people pin on IT is really the cost of fragmented systems that were never built to work together — and that is a fixable problem, not a personality flaw.
Kinetic fixes it by sitting on top of the systems you already have, orchestrating work across them, and giving people one experience that does not make them think about the mess underneath. For organizations with the highest stakes, that layer also comes with government-grade security — including IL5 authorization and more than two decades of work in defense and intelligence environments — so the same approach that makes a help desk feel modern holds up where the audit requirements are unforgiving.
See how the platform works, explore common workflow use cases, or read about Kinetic for IT teams. IT does not have to be the place where requests go to wait. With the right layer on top of your existing systems, it becomes the place where work actually moves.
Share this article