I think sometimes in large corporations there are corporate "preferred" tools, which often get misinterpreted as "mandatory" which could explain some lack of interest from IT.

I've been struggling with getting our organization to entertain the possiblity of hosting "outside" the IT network, made difficult because of our IT security policy where there is a strong push to host everything internally.

It would be waaay cheaper to host our systems outside anyway, but for some reason we'd quite happily spend 3x as much money internally. Yet, the biggest contradiction is nobody internally in IT is willing to front the person hours and an acceptable SLA to support the maintenance needs internally. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't... So I sympathize a little with Michelle's situation.

I think a lot of the resistance from IT is also because of the extra workload they will have to take on board when the LMS/e-learning is rolled ou and they are going to be supporting it year in year out on top of the other application portfolio they already support.

E.g. an IT colleague might have to visit EACH AND EVERY employee pc and install flash, adjust sound cards, make changes to windows host files etc... depending on what software is used and what admin rights most employees have on their pcs, and which http sites they are blocked/unblocked from accessing.

I know of one company, where their IT policy is that all PCs can only have Win XP SP1 and will not budge an inch to advance to XP SP2. Their training colleagues are frustrated, so just upgrading machines to be compliant with the delivered e-learning modules can be problematic.

I recommend speaking to IT in IT language. This means first putting yourself in their shoes to imagine what their hesitations might be, and then addressing them before they can even bring them up. L&D Larry offered some extremely good examples of that above. If we look at the example of someone having to visit every machine to load certain software, you can be ready with information about how they can simply push most of that through the network. In network land, very little has to be done directly at the individual workstation.

I think the bottom line is to understand the objectives of IT and compare them to your objectives. They will likely be able to roll up to a common set of goals such as driving business value while managing costs. Then the relationship with IT becomes one in which each organization have mutual goals and an opportunity to work together to achieve them.

It also helps to understand what IT is most concerned about when it comes to managing new initiatives. In my experience it has come down to support, bandwidth, and cost. In other words how much more support is involved, how much of an impact will it have on internal network resources thus impacting critical business applications, and what extra cost would IT need to absorb?

When you can demonstrate sensitivity to these issues and formulate strategic answers to these questions, IT organizations tend to be more open to innovating ways to achieve the objectives both organizations share.

Just my $0.02

Your IT dept may have a good reason to prefer Flash. It is generally regarded as the most network-friendly way to deliver rich media training. Earlier versions of Lectora required Java/JVM on the desktops, which can be a nightmare for the help desk. Now they use AJAX, which is more compatible.

Hope that at least gets you to thinking like an IT person, as LoveLearning suggested.

Sheldon Murphy
Solid State Learning
www.sslearn.com

Thank you so much for all of the wonderful advice! I will certainly do my best to "think like IT" because I do feel like that will help to build a bridge between the two departments.
You folks are wonderful!