Love IT or Hate IT

Last month I saw this article by Susan Cramm on BusinessWeek's website about "8 Things We Hate About IT" and the scary thing was I think it was written about the shop I work in! Althouth my experience is that Number 2 is more often excellent technology knowledge with a total lack of understanding of the business. Number 7, IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks, was a revelation to me since I consider myself an uber-geek and often wonder what is the deal with my co-workers. I would also add Number 7a, IT Geeks are one trick ponies, maybe it's asking too much, but too many geeks have one area of expertise and are incapable of thinking outside that box. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect an ETL guru to be able to help me with an RJE connectivity issue (yes, we still have RJE); but I do expect him or her to be able to troubleshoot how an ETL job relates to other data in a database.

In fairness, Susan posted a follow-up article, "8 Reasons You Should Love IT" that addressed each of the items, but it sounded like a very arrogant CIO wrote the "rebuttals". Why did I think that? All the buzzwords were there:

• governance
• IT-enabled investments
• stakeholder value

Then there's the general tone:

• "Tackles difficult projects and figures out how to (ultimately) deliver (most of them) without adequate resources and involvement from the other parts of the business. "
• "Provides OTJ training to an ungrateful user community even though much of this tedious work could be eliminated if they mastered the basics of the systems that support their business. "
• "Works long hours supporting old technologies that the company can't afford to upgrade."

The problem is that our customers are more than aware of this arrogance and no matter how much governance we provide or stakeholder value we create; we're a cost center and generally not a revenue generator and we exist to serve those pesky users. I'll get off my soapbox now, I've been reading too much Vlad....