A response to the widespread, gross mischaracterization of IT people
Pseudo-intellectual BS Add commentsI hate the idea of writing about anything even tangentially related to my job because I know people I work with read this page and I’m not usually willing to risk anything I say here being misinterpreted or held against me at a later date. Today, however, I want to draw upon my experience as an IT professional to comment about something posted on John Gruber’s linked list at Daring Fireball.
Question for anti-iPhone IT managers like those quoted in the Wall Street Journal story yesterday: Do you see your role as serving the employees of your company, or ruling over them?
(As an aside, I’m very turned off by how Gruber has divided people into antagonist “anti-iPhone IT managers” and “iPhone doubters” versus protagonist individuals who are implicitly more intelligent. “iPhone doubter” and similar phrases resemble “holocaust denier” and other pejoratives too much for my liking. He’s essentially accusing these people of stupidly “doubting” a reality of iPhone super success that is not yet certain.)
I’m not an anti-iPhone IT manager. I do see my role as serving employees, but not by obeying their every whim. I’ve been hired because of my expertise and to presumably use that expertise to create a work-ready environment. A huge part of my job is to make sure that equipment and services are as reliable and available as they can possibly be so that employees, who are generally technologically ignorant at all but the most shallow levels, can work and make money for the company, and hence, my salary. When either employees or executives dismiss my opinions and recommendations out of hand because they want something that may adversely affect others who rely on the same infrastructure for their jobs, that angers me. It defeats the point of my presence. It relegates me to “just do it because I said so” trained monkey status, and I’ll be damned if I’m anyone’s “do it” bitch. My job is to provide what the company needs to function, manage the infrastructure underlying that function, and protect the same. IT policy by executive edict or end-user whining snowballs into eventual disaster, for which I will take the hit later because of my inability to manage the arbitrary tuna net thrown over top of me.
So I intend to serve the employees the same way a parent serves a child - by knowing better in a lot of cases, and by saying “no” frequently when adverse consequences, including my inability to effectively and securely manage features-by-fiat, are likely to occur. If that means employees sometimes cannot play with their new toys on the corporate network, too bad. It’s not that I rule end users with contempt. I have to consider the big picture, and sometimes that means temporary inconvenience while the IT people plan and test and secure and make sure you have the reliable, functioning technology you need to do your job.
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June 20th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Am I missing something here? If you can & will accept a bone-stock install of MacOS X, and the Safari browser on your network, why wouldn’t you allow an iPhone? They are after all, essentially identical.
This is of course a rhetorical question, not something aimed directly at you Mr. Adams or Mr. Gruber for that matter.
–chuck
June 20th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
The discussion where that quote originated had to do with the idea of accessing Exchange e-mail via the phone. Something about users who want it should get it by whatever means necessary, versus, IT personnel will limit iPhone corporate mail access until they determine an appropriate method. One side seems to be of the opinion that IT’s job is to implement and not question, where the other side seems to think IT should be more cautious. Mr. Gruber framed it as serve versus rule, and I wanted to respond to that.
June 20th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Serve vs rule is going to vary from company to company and the culture it holds. I’ve seen both. Both have their share of issues.
–chuck
June 20th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
I like to think I presented something of a hybrid here. An IT person’s job is not to roll over to users’ every demand, nor is it to actively deny the implementation of useful devices because of prejudice or ignorance. There’s a balance.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
I’m guessing that Gruber’s problem is a result either of experiences with bad IT people, or of reading about them. Unfortunately, it seems that its only the bad experiences we really remember. I recall a recent experience with two separate people telling me the same thing that seemed to make no sense, only to later discover that my amateur (i.e. learning by reading and tinkering) assessment of what was going on was actually the correct one. In my current school, as well as others in which I’ve taught, that has seemed to be the rule rather than the exception.
When you get used to incompetents, you sometimes forget that there are dedicated, hardworking people who really know what they’re doing. You assume laziness when caution and prudence is the real explanation. You think “What could go wrong?”, forgetting that their job is to respond, “I have no idea what could go wrong, that’s why we can’t do it yet.”
Such a viewpoint leads more towards bloviation than actual commentary.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
For what it’s worth, I’ve experienced both arrogant dismissal (as opposed to officially-motivated policy behavior towards unauthorized software and behavior) and benign accommodation from IT at my company over a period of four years. A far cry from the best case: the proactive team at an advertising company I temped for (I’m a print designer) in 2002, who aggressively supported a large mixed-platform company with canny efficiency, courtesy and knowledge of detail.
My print production department’s networking and server share access/backup needs (one of several enclaves of Macs within an MS-Exchange-run corporation) first had to grow to a size which warranted acknowledgment of a significant cost/profit center. That was two or three years ago.
Our network access still varies greatly in quality. We create and edit large InDesign/Illustrator/Photoshop docs from the server, which, many days, spin the beachball with every save. Some nodes within our cubicle prairie still can’t see certain printers or each other. Wireless access is still only granted to users of Dell laptops, mostly MBAs or their plug-in larvae. Whenever one of us Mac users needs a RAM upgrade, IT sends some poor intern who doesn’t realize that a G5 is a workstation, not a Dell throwaway. He then tries to install the chips without first determining whether they need parity/pair positioning on the board. It usually takes an inability to restart before the guy will look at the printout of the machine’s manual which verifies what I’ve warned him not to do.
Sorry for the rant, but we’re all going to have very great differences of opinion about IT culture. I’m just trying to get design work done, but I’ve been the Human Help Menu for far too long, in far too many places. I don’t care what the frat boys in the server room think of me and my toy computer.
I admire your writing a great deal, Mr. Adams. But if you were reacting to Gruber’s possibly-unintentional generalization with another one, I’d like to remind you that there are still some MCSE bigots out there who’d just as soon I disappeared from the face of the earth. This might explain a bit of the tone you’re seeing in posts by people like Gruber and, perhaps, Dilger.