Some wording in an internal draft here at Farpoint Group raised a few eyebrows – but there was no insult intended. I was simply trying to make a point regarding ease of use, a point that, it seems, requires repeating.
To cut to the chase, the offensive (and, in retrospect, I can see how it might in fact be so interpreted) language referred to a certain (and large) class of organizations as “less technically sophisticated”. What I was trying to say (and, yes, I changed the wording for the next draft) was that many IT shops don’t live and breathe technology – they have the clearly vital job of provisioning IT resources for their users, but they can’t be expected to know all of the low-level details of everything they’re using. There are a huge number of firms, around the globe, that simply don’t have the staffs, or the time, or the money, to dig into every in and out. They just want to keep the plumbing running, keep their users happy, and do an upgrade now and then.
IT professionals, and, indeed, technical professionals everywhere, have historically prided themselves on speaking a different language from those outside their field. I remember back in college having detailed discussions about “modems” and “operating systems” and “partitioned data sets” and “JCL” when only a few people on the planet knew what these were, and the low level of general sophistication in computers and communications (there were, for example, no real networks as we know them today) demanded detailed attention to almost every element of the technology involved. Core dumps. Assembly language. You get the idea.
And such was fun at the time; after all, we were inventing as we went along and we thought more in terms of technology than solutions. The opposite is true today, however, and it’s now all about productivity, especially that of the users of the resources we provision and maintain. But just as ease-of-use is important for that end-user base, so it should also be for the people who, again, keep the plumbing running. Complexity is no longer cool, and neither is a requirement for detailed technical knowledge just to get the network up and keep it running. What’s so wrong with making things easy? Want to hold down operational expense (we’re talking real and significant money here)? Such is, in fact, the key to success today – for everyone!
I am personally looking forward to the day when purchasing systems that are easy to use is a badge of honor, and not viewed as training wheels or IT for beginners. Less technical sophistication in operation, I would argue, is in fact critical – the products themselves can be as internally complex and sophisticated as required, but the externals need to be easy, self-documenting, self-configuring, self-operating, self-diagnosing, and self-correcting as the situation may require and the solutions allow. As an example, consider the radio resource management facilities that all of the major WLAN vendors today provide, making low-level decisions that would be tough even for a human with detailed RF and system-specific knowledge and thus dramatically easing the task of operating a wireless LAN. While I still enjoy exploring the intricacies of networking (and, of course, wireless), I’d prefer to make changes and solve problems quickly wherever possible – and also maybe get a weekend off now and then.
