MikePadgett.com

The generation gap in business IT

— It struck me during my afternoon codebreak today that there’s never any good news in IT, is there? So I decided to do a quick poll to see if I…”

It struck me during my afternoon codebreak today that there’s never any good news in IT, is there?

So I decided to do a quick poll to see if I was merely having a bad case of the “tech grumps”, the kind that spreads widerife across whole teams of sys admins.

• Slashdot: 5/19
• Computing: 0/3
• The Register: 4/41
• IT Week: 4/12

Average good news: 18%

OK, yeah. Fine. These aren’t lab conditions: I’m defining “good news” as anything I consider positive either for people, users, governments or whatever.

I occasionally hear people saying that TV news is depressing. I tell them to try digesting a week’s worth of IT news instead, it’ll constipate them. In response, they do that laugh – the one that means “oh, really?”, or sometimes just “er, who are you and what are you doing eavesdropping on my conversations?”

If an IT trade rag intends to cater well for IT folk, then its editorial style must take on the texture of the IT sense of humour, which is kind of like Hawaiian beaches: windswept, ultra dry and invariably black.

Adopting the spots of this particular leopard (uh, what?) is plenty easy for many of the idiots they dredge up for so-called ‘expert comment’. These people are all members of the same tribe and to be in that tribe, you’ve got to be male, have the word ‘information’ in your job title, and sport grey hair with at least 40% baldness.

Peter Cochrane, who probably only has a fringe affinity with said tribe because he has a fringe, is one of these expert comments. But Peter’s well connected and well respected. You could ask him to namecheck the dons of every spiffy IT corporation there is, because he’s worked with most of them.

Peter reckons [1], “Young people will kill off the IT department”. But at the risk of offending a young 1st Liner fishing about for role models on his lunchbreak, Peter qualifies this with by saying this is an incredibly powerful (positive) force in your organisation. That’s “your” organisation as in “the organisation in which you’ve got tons of share options in addition to your six-figure salary”.

Moreover, says Peter, “they don’t want to be told by an IT department which hardware and software they can and can’t use”, because they’ll know more about technology than the IT department.

So there are all these ‘young people’ – under 40, presumably – who don’t need support. Our 1st Liner’s going to be out of a job soon, unless he gets out of support and into management.

Our tribe needs to stick together on the unfamiliar floors below the Board’s top floor penthouse, where the carpets have no coffee stains and the box canvases on the wall have been done by ‘recognised’ artists rather than nursery school kids.

Many of the Gris et Chauve legionaries are so far out of touch with our 1st Liner that they will have to recruit a ‘Technical Authority’ who will whisper acronyms in their ear whilst they’re on the line to a trade rag wanting the zeitgest on corporate network security policy. That kind of chatter doesn’t roll easily off the furred tongues of our tribe, which consists of individuals who are more comfortable fielding questions such as “what IT will look like in the 22nd century?” and “what role could the monthly award of a golden pair of Gap Chinos play in energising development teams?”

Some tribe members find it hard to retire. The attractions of the Bentley and thrice golf daily insteady of twice golf daily are dull in lustre when compared to overstaying one’s welcome on the Board, cutting down every rising technostar. And when they pass on, their strategic position on Offshoring is revered as prophecy and their brains are preserved in government think tanks.