IT Are A Different Breed
March 29, 2005
I'm not saying they're all aliens, but I am positing the theory that they're definitely a bit different.
Over the past few weeks, I've had the joy of working closely with rather a lot of IT people. I've even started socialising with some too, but those ones claim to be more 'business focussed.' They shun the IT title like it's some form of contagious disease or something.
People who don't understand what I do often think that I'm 'real technical'. No I'm not. I'm 'real marketing' and that means I'm good with words and getting in the minds of target customers - oh and taking ownership and responsiblity for things that I do.
IT people, on the other hand, like to keep us all mystified as to how they do. And they're not that into taking responsiblity for things. No. That's because usually in a project there's a whole lot of their type involved and that makes it easy to pass the ownership load along the way. I know this because I came up against it time and again in my corporate days and because I'm faced with it now again. When you're working in a large organisation, you get the IT team shuffle. "That's not our area, you need to ring the helpdesk, log a ticket and ask them to get someone from XYZ team down to you."
When you're in a small business, you get the same thing, only with different companies involved. So there's one IT company doing one thing, another providing another service, and still 1 other offering another IT service. This is maddening when something goes wrong, because there are 3 entities to pass on the ownership to.
The above is a toned down version of a rant that really wasn't all that fair to IT people and was also classifying them as cliches, which is wrong. God, using cliches shows a lack of creativity that that's the last thing I want to show here!