The Future of IT – A Story and Prediction
We are entering a new decade of computing. The past decade and beyond was all about innovation and new technology, and there is new and exciting technology still to come! Still, while we may have the technology toys were are still at the mercy of IT professionals to fix them. I have a particularly keen sense of reading the moods of people and something I have seen happening is that the general public and business is becoming more and more angry and fed up with IT professionals. The underlying feeling has them confused and looking for answers, which has not boded well for the IT industry. Before I get into the how and the why, I would like to take a minute to tell a story.
Just over a year ago I sat in a sales meeting with non-technical business colleagues. This sales meeting was advertised as a “training session” for users of a certain ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. I arrived that morning eager to learn with notepad and pen in hand. After about an hour of listening and not having one single bit of information to write down, my eyes started wandering about the room. I was looking mostly at accountants, buyers, business owners, and other non-technical people who had been delegated the task of administering the ERP software. Why were all of these eager faces looking at the salesmen like they were gods?
The answer is simple, these new IT gods were telling them that they did not need IT people to run this software and that it was, in fact, as easy to use as Microsoft Office programs, after all, it was built around Microsoft technology. I had personally been working with this software for only a short time, but I can tell you in my professional opinion, it was not simple. Sure, the basics could be learned by anyone, but if you wanted to customize it and needed elaborate reports, or BOM’s it was quite a different story. I gathered up the courage and asked a question that required the sales person to actually use the software, rather than show pre-made demonstrations, or how they actually achieved what they were demonstrating as being simple. He stuttered a little, hesitated, then began to rather quickly go back and attempt a layman’s rendition. He looked at all of the confused faces around the room and quickly changed the subject recovering nicely with the audience, there almost an audible sigh as he steered them back onto the path of fancy easy to use upgrades and features.
I could not believe my eyes, or ears, and ended up feeling like this was a waste of an entire day, because I wasn’t learning anything about the software I was here to learn about. Why were my colleagues and all of these other, seemingly intelligent people, staring at the sales people like they were in a hypnotized zombie-like state? What was wrong with these people? Couldn’t they see that they were being schmoozed over by slick salesmen whose intention was for them not to hire software admins, so that they could continue to make money off of their naive hopes of eliminating in- house or contract IT people? To answer my own question, the answer is simply that they WANTED to believe it badly enough, therefore it must be true.
My eyes were opened that day. I realized that educated people were tired of being at the mercy of IT professionals, especially arrogant ones who never try to explain things to them in plain English. They all possessed a common bond where they wanted to feel empowered to solve their own technical problems and standing there before them were these software sales genius’s telling them they could be free. What happened over the past decade that has made people so cynical towards the IT industry?
Many things have happened, money, budgets, etc.. to make corporate America re-think IT needs, but It really is the fault of IT professionals that people have become disillusioned with them. I have been around enough Network Administrators, Programmers, Software Administrator, Help Desk technicians etc to know that by not sharing information and talking above non-technical people it somehow has given them this God-like status and they are not about to give it up without a fight! The funny, or not so funny, thing is that a great number of professional IT people do not even have college degrees, which must further widen the gap for those that worked hard and got that degree to be where they are today.
IT people demand high wages, special treatment, and carry around an air of superiority that has made other professionals and consumers fed up. The proof can be seen in the numbers of companies outsourcing IT nowadays. With the exception of technology companies I fully expect this trend to continue throughout the next decade until, being forced into the role of customer service, these arrogant assholes realize that they are no more important than anyone else in the company and start behaving with a team player attitude and adjusting for past mistakes. Not only that, but we will see an increase in educated IT people who are more user-centric.
In all fairness there are very good IT people out there, I like to think of myself as one of them. I have been looked down upon by my fellow IT co-workers for not seeming “techie” enough. I didn’t start out as an IT professional I worked hard to become one, so I feel like I appreciated the position of others in a more enlightened manner. End users do not want to hear technical jargon and be confused more, they just want a simple explanation, to be heard, and to have their problem solved, yesterday!
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