I still remember hearing an executive in IT at Virginia Power start a sentence like this, and he went on to say it's like a house before chastising the developers for being slow. I was on the ops team and liked the analogy, finding it funny. Course I hadn't done a lot of software development outside my bedroom and was young.
I've had an interesting editorial series this week comparing software development to builders, lawyers, doctors, and engineers. The discussions are worth reading and it's definitely opened my eyes quite a bit.