Elitism in IT
Twice in the past weeks I have come across blog entries and comments with a blunt display of elitism from IT professionals. I find this appalling because I have known a lot of IT people, and most of them are usually completely ignorant of how to run a business. In the first case, Susan Cramm was commenting on the problem with building trust between IT and the business, but she used an unfortunate example of a CIO that forced his techs to teach their business counterparts how to use reporting tools. The way the story was told, it implied that the business counterparts might be smart enough to learn this stuff, and that the learning challenge was one-way.
In the second instance, LucidEra’s veterans admitted a lesson they learned was that they overestimated the ability of their customers to do their own analytics. OK, I’d wager that means the product did not fit the needs of the customers, but the comments went down that elitist path, some going so far as to question the customer’s IQ. Hey! Who’s business failed in this story?
Most IT people have very little experience in real business. Their lives are mostly insolated from the day to day challenges of making a buck to pay the bills, dealing with real customers and their ridiculous demands. Just because they can create something so complicated that other people can’t use it?
