Being in IT is a funny job. I often get told I don’t have the personality of an “IT guy” whatever that means. I don’t know if those words are synonumous with “mouth breathing basement dweller” but I see myself more as the personable sales type than the nerdy tech-monkey that I get to play on TV (in my head).
Along with this basement dweller persona, you also get a very different attitude. Much like “Nick Burns – Your Company’s Computer Guy” from SNL, the IT guy is usually the gatekeeper of what goes and doesn’t go in an organization. No youtube at work… his fault. No bandwidth for Final Four… his fault. Facebook… his fault, but his terminal will definitly work, for testing of course.
It’s easy to fall into this trap as well as an admin too. I’ve caught myself doing it several times. On one side we have users who we percieve as troublesome kids that keep putting their fingers in electrical sockets (so tape up all the electrical sockets) and on the other side, we need to progress as organization to be more profitable and effecient. What I’m getting at is our users are sometimes limited by our ourselves, the IT department.
This realization came to me a few months ago while listening to some podcasts and reading a book called Drive. What I’ve finally come up with is this… I want to work on the cool stuff. The things that challenge me as a professional and as a person. Locking down ports and traffic, checking productivity monitors, and figuring out a way to lock the cookies on the top shelf is not the best, or most fun, use of my time. I want to end everyday asking and answering “yes” to “was I better today than I was yesterday?” To me that means did I empower more people to do more things with IT or was I a hinderence today?
I would actually argue that if you find yourself spending too much time setting up controls, your company is not hiring the right kind of people. A company today needs to be a playground filled with the right kind of kids that are encouraged to explore. Set up the fences (expectations) and let them go. You will be pleasantly surprised to find what they can do when you hire the right people with the right motivators.
What we as an industry needs to realize is that unless we are working in large data centers in 10 years hardware will be a very small part of our day to day. Those that haven’t started transitioning skills sets to more business unit alignment and solution development will be hard pressed to find employment. My focus on tech in the future is using it to expand the human element of our business. Thanks for the post.
And thank you for the response… absolutely agree 1000%. Hardware is easily managed but the human element is sometimes the most difficult part to antcipate.
I see a lot of us tranisitioning more in a “solution developers” instead of IT people. IT is a part of it, but we need to recognize and exploit the human element of the problem.
Totally agree. Desktop support is on the way out in the next 10 years, and the real face of IT will be through desktop virtualization. It’s more about finding an elegant solution to the problem, be it through processes and policies, or (my favorite) throwing lots of shiny new tech at it.
What’s interesting about this post is how you evangelize the productivity with a balance of challenging one’s self to explore the greatest products and solutions on the market. If the face of IT is to ever change, at least from the perspective of outside looking in, the industry needs to do far more of this. Not only do they need to spread the word amongs colleuges, but to any organization that utilizes IT. I think the industry as a whole has failed in this aspect. While they may preach the mantra of hiring creative sorts to do their work, they don’t want to reap the costs of it. It will take uber cool and sexy people like us (yes our wives may disagree on that point) to really hammer into the heads of finance how our training in the humanities is under nourished in our work life. If we are to be succesful, adapting to system architecture change is only half of it in my humble opinion. Companies really need to have their IT people show their value in manners that can truly speak to the users.
This comment was winded as well as rambling. Carry on…