Company: "IT is terrible at their jobs, what are we going to do about this!"

IT director: "Give me a budget to hire competent IT people"

Company: "On the other hand, we're ok with this IT incompetence"

Interesting, in my experience generally it's business types that don't know shit from their elbow and don't include IT early enough due to negligence.

My experience is admittedly limited but every case I've seen of IT being called in late was that IT would have reasons for no. The VP didn't even learn their lesson when circumventing IT ended up with all corporate e-mail down for nearly a week. (As predicted, although it ended up taking longer to fix because I was on the other side of the world, internet access but unreachable by phone.)

That's fair, 90% of people are shit at their jobs. I'm just saying, if it is me, I'm definitely upset you did that and I think I'm justified in that.

A low-trust environment is exhausting for everyone, and a difficult pit to climb out of.

I would guess that completely incompetent IT departments that only degrades everybody's work are very highly correlated to workplaces that use those huge, all in 1, hired consultants based software packages.

Sounds like a good reason to bring them in even earlier