Re: "get senior management to take the issues seriously"
"I think we should not expect business people to understand the IT stuff."
I'm all for the old mantra of 'we must meet business half way' and suchlike, but tbh I've seen a hell of a lot more effort from IT to understand business than I've ever seen from business to understand IT. We have things like Agile and ITIL, which love or loathe are very much efforts on IT's part to get to grips with what business wants from us. However, in most departments I've worked in, the problem hasn't been IT expecting business to understand the IT stuff, but rather business not understanding that business doesn't understand the IT stuff.
In many businesses, there is a general belief that IT is staffed by wizards who can make literally anything happen with no new equipment or budget just by 'typing some code' (never mind that I'm a systems engineer, and 'writing code' barely features in my professional life). Complete refusal to learn anything more technically involved than email or how to download Fruit Ninja onto an iPhone means that most of management is completely unequipped to understand whether what they want is possible, feasible, or sensible, and most IT procedure is ignored or belittled as meaningless bureaucracy.
Simultaneously, they disregard literally any expert advice offered by IT staff on whether their new idea is actually feasible. The attitude is very much one of 'but I want it!', and because I'm apparently Gandalf the Grey I can just make that happen in two minutes or so through the magical coding skills that are in no way connected to my job. And this is where IT's much-discussed 'arrogant, smug tone of voice' comes from; we are so used to being interactions users who act like spoiled children that condescension is the natural response.
I work for architects, and I generally understand what it is they do. I don't understand the minor details, but in general they draw building plans using CAD software, generate manifests for the materials that will be used, and create and offer presentations in order to show the client what they are trying to do. I can, on any given day, give a reasonable estimate of what an architect will be spending their time doing. However, if you ask most of the other staff what it is *I* do, I'd doubt more than 2-3 would be able to give you even a vague idea. They may describe me as a hacker, or a coder, or a 'computer genius', or as 'a guy who fixes computers'. They have simply no idea of the reality of my job or what it is I'm employed to do, and have little interest in figuring it out.
This is the attitude of a child to a parent's job - they understand that I spend a lot of my time doing something called 'work', but they don't have even an rough idea of what it involves. This alone shows that business has not made any serious effort to "meet us halfway" and achieve any sort of synthesis with IT. The entire cultural setup is that if anything has a plug on it, then there's no point even trying to get a vague understanding of it and it should be surrendered entirely to the wizard, who will chant the incantations and appease the Server Gods. There IS some sign of improvement in the younger generation - even the non-technical users under the age of 30 take an active interest in what I do and how things work - but the older generation are pretty much a lost cause and there's no real chance of any improvement until they retire.