Death of the Geek
Author: Dennis D. Weiskircher, Jr.

Information Technology people are notoriously hard to get along with. Your typical IT professional is intelligent, thinks fast on his feet, and he’s usually a great problem solver. They do not, however, posses much in the way of people skills, nor do they understand how their technology impacts the business as a whole. Conversely, other business units posses a similar disinterest in how the IT department affects them.

IT people speak to each other in their own language, something I refer to as “geek-speak.” They dress different then the other employees, communicate different, and automatically treat employees outside of the IT department as untrustworthy and the enemy. We use acronyms for everything. “I had to enable NETBIOS over TCP/IP to get my new XP boxes to talk to our NT boxes.” Makes perfect sense to me, but to anyone outside of my field it might as well have been said in Greek. This is where most IT people can benefit from some time outside of their department.

I try to spend at least one lunch hour every week with someone totally unrelated to my job. I want to know what they do, how they do it, how do they utilize the various technologies of our business to help them perform their job, and what would they change about our use of technology to make their job easier or more efficient. You would be surprised by the reactions I get when I ask these questions. Or maybe you wouldn’t be. When was the last time your IT guy came to you and asked how your system was running and what could he/she change about it to make your job easier?

If you’re an IT professional, when was the last time you came down from Mt. Olympus (the server room) and walked amongst the non-geeks? When was the last time you sold the employees of your company on the benefits of upgrading their email program rather than just performing the upgrade and leaving them to muddle their way through?

Technical people who are strictly technical people will find themselves the victims of an ever shrinking demand for technical only people. Techies who are truly succeeding and breaking into the upper-levels of management are those who typically do not have the strongest technical background, but they do posses the ability to see the big picture and sell that to upper management. Senior management does not want to know the intricacies of how your Network Attached Storage works, what they want to know is that they aren’t going to run out of storage space for the important sales database. They don’t need to know that the new switches you bought work on layer 3 vs. the old layer 2 switches; they want to know that their network connection is faster and more reliable, and how much money the savings in man hours translate into. The technical professional who can translate the magical world of IT into the practical world of bottom-line business will find themselves in ever increasing demand.

Learn to embrace the business first, and then find the right IT solution to grow your business.






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Dennis Weiskircher is the MIS Coordinator for PBK Bank, a community bank in central Kentucky.

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