If you read only one article this week (not counting this blog post), make sure it’s this one by CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum – “Enterprise IT’s Top Enemy: Its Own Arrogance.”
An IT department that points and laughs is hardly encouraging learning and business alignment.
The piece highlights the fact that the help desk, despite the growing importance of IT/business alignment in the enterprise, remains in the “condescending gatekeeper role.”
As evidence, Wailgum includes a video that features Andy Bitterer, co-chair of Gartner Group’s BI Summit, doing Jay Leno-style “man-on-the-street” interviews in London. Among Bitterer’s questions to the masses: “Do you use a database?” “Do you know what Business Intelligence tools are?” “Do you know what OLAP is?”
Honestly, does this Gartner bloke really expect everyday people to know what these things are? As Wailgum asserts, Gartner conference attendees may find it amusing (ha, look at the stupid users!), but it really demonstrates how out of touch IT is with its customers.
This paragraph, in which Wailgum describes IT’s image problem, is particularly illustrative: “A technological arrogance that lurks behind and manifests itself in arcane techno mumbo-jumbo and smug conceit, that, for lack of a better word, really pisses off end-users and has turned them against IT departments.”
Nicely put, Wailgum.
What’s really troubling about the five-minute video, however, is the fact that a number of the interviewees seem to be lying when the say they do know what OLAP and BI are. Perhaps they feel compelled to pretend they know, even though they clearly have no idea.
Feigning knowledge to avoid appearing ignorant happens in the workplace all the time. And an IT department that points and laughs is hardly encouraging learning and business alignment. Such a help desk delivers only lost productivity, and a whole lot of errors.
I don’t find that funny at all, and neither should a CIO.
FOR THE RECORD: OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing (Wikipedia page here); and Business Intelligence, or BI, uses technologies, processes and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes (Wikipedia page here).
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