What Happened To All The Geeks? Orginally posted on the BCS Website on 23 Mar 2009
For me, working in IT is all about the technology. The hardware and the software and the fun things you have to do to make it all work together in a wonderful (and useful) way. If you look about the modern IT office, you are unlikely to see many people who feel this way. Which makes me wonder, what happened to all the Geeks in IT?
IT is still a very young industry, and in the short time it’s been around as a discipline it has changed dramatically. Only 20 years ago, most large Corporates were still tied into the mainframe model, and serious desktop computing was only just starting to emerge. On the back of this, new support and engineering departments evolved, containing mostly people who were passionate about their jobs, with good technology knowledge to boot. These people were the first generation to grow up with computers in their homes, and their enthusiasm for the seemingly un-limitless potential of this new technological marvel knew no bounds. Anything was possible, and these geeks spent night after night in front of a keyboard exploring, learning and improving.
So, during the 1990s there was the computer boom. This wasn’t just driven by the drop in hardware prices, but by the enthusiasts. They took what was unfathomable and made it accessible to the masses. These were the people who could help you when your PC crashed, or your spreadsheet died, or when you found yourself suddenly staring at monochrome DOS prompt. IT support used to consist of a bunch of geeks who could fix anything, normally in a short timeframe. For medium sized offices this situation worked really well.
Of course, as corporate business scaled up and wanted all their IT in one efficient department, this silo based approach to embedded knowledge was considered unmanageable. So the large scale service model was born with the now familiar 3 tier system of Call Centre, 2nd Line (or Desktop Support) and 3rd Line (Engineering). In this new regime, high skilled individuals were considered single point of failures, and emphasis was put on distributing the knowledge across many individuals in many departments or teams.
The Geek in the office was no longer invited to the party and those that couldn’t adapt just unplugged and left the industry, leaving behind those that weren’t as good as the geeks, and those that only entered IT because ‘they’d read that it paid well, and let’s face it, a History degree is a bit useless isn’t it?’.
Then over the next few years, in true Lord of the Flies style, the semi-geeks were out-manoeuvred by the history-degree-people, and once the dust finally settled, all Corporate IT was left with was a sea of non technical middle managers, and low skill, low paid engineers. Corporate IT had become a stale wasteland of paperwork, processes, and endless meetings.
Without the Geeks, there will be no ongoing innovation in Corporate IT, and it will continue its decline into a vendor-driven utility service. To combat this, every IT department needs to embrace the concept of a Futures or Innovations Team, whose role it is to explore, learn, and improve on the service and technology that’s currently being provided. This team can then feed into the rest of the IT department with direction and recommendations.
All too often senior management not only give strategic direction but also define the technology that is to be used, leaving the actual people on the ground to work out how to shoehorn competing and often incompatible technologies into the estate. Strategies should be driven from the top down by management and the products to match driven up by the Geeks. Only then can true service synergy be achieved, and you both geeks and management in equal measure to achieve that…
If like me you are a proud Geek, then stand tall, and defend your faith, your IT Department depends on your skills.
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