Oh dear, what have we here! This priceless comment was posted on Slashdot, yes Slashdot, the haunt of arguablly the most techie of all techie's, a couple of weeks ago. Since then a debate has been raging on the web about the state of the IT / Business / User interface.

The post starts:

"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year. Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our charter?"

Most IT people would at this point highlight the glaring contradictory statement, "knowledgeable user input". The first sarcastic reply from an IT person did:

"The non-IT employees at my company (approximately some 5,000,000,000 people) are showing signs of incompetence, and have been ignoring knowledgeable technology input for about a year. Additionally, they haven't been able to accept needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable computer usage, maxed bandwidth usage, and no common sense have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We geeks are staging a revolt to make users more responsible to IT by creating a group from the company divisions to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our meeting room to kill as many people as possible?"

Just when it couldn't get any worse a medical student pipes up claiming to have an 'iota' of an idea of what might be reasonable to expect from an IT department. He requests, no expects, security of data, continual access, work ethic from the IT department, no lazy people and no techno-babble to hide incompetence. He doesn't stop here though, on to a 'winner' he continues to expect honesty no less, he doesn't want to be overcharged for IT services or hardware and he wants to be kept abreast of IT developments without being bored with details or feeling like he's being sold something he doesn't need.

Red rag to a bull springs to mind. You can't beat calling someone lazy, incompetent and dishonest to breed good relations.

Following this you would have expected a barrage of replies from the IT community and, while some is forthcoming, they actually partake in another activity that drives end users up the wall. They started a discussion on the various pros and cons of password policies, passing through cryptography and ending up at the Enigma machine, Godwin's Law and Alan Turing.

The thread eventually gets back on topic.

"Maybe your company, like most others, is drastically underfunding the IT department, expecting superhuman performance on less than shoe-string budgets, while every day demanding all new buzzword compliant services and ignoring IT requests for additional warm bodies. Not to mention the fact that you are using high maintenance Microsoft Outlook type services while surfing for pr0N and jam packing your mail server full of the latest Happy Fun Party videos that everyone is mailing around."

"My pet peeve is being told what platforms to support, training budget spent on hardware, having to support a single server that needs to have 24/7 uptime built on commodity hardware, having end users think that a 250 gig hard drive for $150 is going to cut it as enterprise grade hardware, being pestered for every little thing that remotely has to do with IT, answering the exact same question over and over, even though you spent the time to put up a FAQ on it after the same person asked you the answer every damned day."

Christopher Koch over at CIO Blogs picked up on this and his blog has some constructive comments on the love-hate relationship between business, IT and end-users.

The business loves IT because it enables more business to be done in less time, but it expects 100% uptime and unachievable turnaround time on projects with the minimum of financial outlay. End users hate IT because it breaks, doesn't do what it should and treats them like idiots. IT hates end users because they break things, lie, assume the IT department are miracle workers and they ask the same questions over and over again.

Of course most, if not all, successful IT strategies and departments revolve around communication and management of expectations versus cost. There needs to be an understanding on what the IT department needs to be able to it's job. There needs to be an agreement / contract in place that sets out the service levels required by the business and at what cost, and this needs to be agreed to by the IT department. Generally, there also needs to be a budget in place for people training for IT and IT training for the people.

This quote from Charles Babbage proves that this issue has been around since the dawn of computers and will very probably be around for a long time to come. "On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Finally, watch out for our upcoming 'Best IT Department' poll.

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