IT Professionalism

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:57:00 GMT

One of the first sections I read when I open up my ComputerWorld Canada (and ComputerWorld in the United States) is "Shark Tank". Shark Tank is a column compiled by ComputerWorld staff of anonymous anecdotes and IT-related blunders. These snafus are contributed by readers and the publisher promises "not to publish your name or any details that would identify you".

These blurbs make for entertaining reading. My recent copy tells a story of a help desk call from a user that their ERP system isn't working. It turns outs that after escalating the call, we find out that the user has a pop-up blocker installed and that this 'safety' software caused the problem. At this point, we readers, I guess, are supposed to collectively nod our head, sighing "those stupid users". But when I read these stories, I almost always think of a hundred thing that IT should have been doing to mitigate these sorts of blunders. I do chuckle at the stories, but I'm guessing that most readers fail to see the irony of an IT story reflecting poorly on the IT side just as much as it does on the business users.

I'd think that most of the causes of these mishaps is education. User education, but also IT support staff education on prevention and risk mitigation. Who really cares whether a user knows that the cable coming our of their computer is called an Ethernet cable or, as the user in one of the anecdotes called it, an "e-mail cable"? Why is it funny when they use the wrong terminology and what makes a professional think that it is the users fault when they don't know our terminology? Perhaps we should start quizzing the support technician on the intricacies of double declining balance depreciation or testing programmers on the nature of high pressure gas lines and then publishing their answers in accounting and engineering magazines.

As bad as these stories still make us IT pros look, I still read them, first thing, either when the paper copy shows up at my mailbox or in the daily feed I get for CW via Avantgo on my PocketPC. Why? Because reading how our work leads to user mistakes makes me think harder about anticipating what a user might do. We IT pros don't do nearly enough self-assessment of how we contributed to a IT problem, even if the user shared part of the blame. In fact, being a fairly new profession, we are perhaps the only one that does not study our failures and publish the reasons and contributors to those failures.

I am all for the studying of IT failures, but let's not be so hard on the business users. If they screw up using our systems, it could be our fault, not theirs.

Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture

IT Professionalism