When was the last time you were thanked for making something work, instead of being blamed when something did not work?

The chances are that like most IT professionals, people only notice you and your systems when the fail-safe technology you bought from the vendor starts to fail.

The explanation is plain and simple – technology professionals have a thankless task and a miserable image within the business. We only have ourselves to blame, allowing IT to take a subservient role to other departments.

Rather than being seen as a core function, such as finance, business technology is still viewed as a service, in the same way as human resources or facilities management.

Such a position is misguided. Your company is reliant on IT, as well as the data it uses and stores.

Just as finance is all about efficiency and cost savings, modern business technology is all about, well, efficiency and cost savings.

Can you remember a time when a chief information officer (CIO) took a random punt on a multimillion-pound IT system in the hope it improved customer service or internal integration?

Probably around the turn of the millennium, when dot com madness helped sow the seeds for much of the cynicism towards business technology that still exists today.

But banishing such cynicism will rely on a proactive stance, particularly when you are asked to respond to technical business requests from other executives in your firm.

Andrew Vermes, senior consultant at Kepner-Tregoe, encourages IT leaders to respond to technical requests with one key question: ‘Why do you want me to do it?’

He says CIOs using such a technique discover that executives are unsure – in one instance, a technology leader at a blue-chip company found that 60 per cent of managers did not know why they had made the request.

Getting executives to recognise that you and your team are not just a dumping ground for ephemeral technical ideals will help establish your identity in the business.

It will also help other managers around the business to recognise that with the emergence of Web 2.0 and content-centric technologies, IT is not a service as much as a core function.

The opportunity to change our image is in your hands. Grasp it.