Can you work without a PC nowadays ? Rant on...
IT, users and the business have had an uneasy but interesting relationship over the last three decades. The arrival of the Personal Computer heralded a revolution in the workplace. Users discovered that they could do things that previously IT had said were not possible. The business discovered huge productivity gains although some of those were quickly lost as process failed to cope with the influx of technology.
The "them and us" world of IT and its image of ivory towers, was supposed to have be confined to the history books. Sadly, while IT may have lost its absolute control with the arrival of the PC, it has been fighting to reassert some of that, every since.
Today, IT needs to move away from a "take it or leave it" approach and become part of the business. The rarefied skill sets that used to set the Data Processing department apart from everyone else are now used by workers on a daily basis. Users write their own SQL queries against databases, build complex spreadsheets, manipulate data warehouses to find new trends to exploit. The mystique that was IT has, in many people's eyes, been as debunked as mostly magic tricks.
So how does IT become part of the business process?
The short answer is by understanding what the business wants. IT has a history of deploying technology for technologies sake. Systems are often more about making the life of IT easier than pleasing the users and benefiting the business.
Yet business needs to accept its own responsibility here. Business needs to plan ahead. By telling the IT department what the business goals are for the next year or even two, three or five years, it can sit down with IT and look at how to deliver on those needs.
Users can help both the business and IT by not meekly accepting new systems. A "what's in it for me?" approach might seem confrontational to some but why would you use something that isn't going to improve what you do? Users are often caricatured as either sheep or serial complainers and those complaints are always after the fact.
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