Hi there! Welcome to our blog. Don't forget to sign up for our free RSS feed. We Triple Dog Dare Ya! And thanks for visiting!

Christopher Koch summarizes, with his usual insight, a slashdot conversation on IT versus end users. One of the most interesting statements to come out of the discussion is that IT needs to be viewed as a business resource. If you call up IT five times a month because you keep forgetting your password, and they have to deal with you (and everyone else like you) and not the mail server that’s down, then really, it’s about abuse of company resources, right?

One thing that I’ve noticed in the past five years is a tendency of the creative folks (marketing/advertising/etc) to view IT folks and IT resources (hardware/software/networking/backup/storage/security) in terms they readily understand–promotional campaigns and promotional assets. I’ve seen entire web sites powered by content management systems and integrated with dozens of back-office systems ripped out for no good reason and new ones put in place by different vendors because the new vendor wasn’t just a design agency, they “also did content management.” Unfortunately, the new system now needs to be integrated with all those data sources (as those connections represent services used by real users in the enterprise). (To be absolutely fair, in 99.99999% of these situations, this stuff happened while IT was asleep at the wheel, or because IT didn’t properly communicate the value of current systems, but that’s a whole other post.)

One thing that’s on my personal wish list is for marketing professionals to view IT as systems and not just outcomes. That web site you’re running with a CMS that talks to an ERP or CRM system and ecommerce and who knows what else is more complicated than a new advertising campaign. Many of you already get it, and I love you for it. I readily understand the need for something new and fresh, but please! Ask first so we can plan.

Another thing that’s on my wish list is for IT guys to treat everyone like a customer. Anyone who works for me has to treat our customers like customers. No hosing them down with jargon and then running away–good old fashioned English, please. No creating of cool technical stuff just because its cool–it has to solve the business problem. In fact, this means that the person who does the work has to take the time to figure out the business problem, not just roar in like a kamikaze and start doing what’s best for the client.

In any case, check out Koch’s blog post here. It’s kinda longish, but worth it, as Koch gives equal time to the bad behavior on both sides of the IT/end-user divide.

Bookmark:

Tags: No Comments