The much smarter way to appreciate IT

Technology for technology's sake can drive you mad

There was a certain degree of personal satisfaction at Apple’s announcement last week that early sales of the iPhone have been a disappointment. As I wrote in this column last month, I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about for a very expensive smartphone with limited functionality.

But perhaps I’m not the best person to judge.

My colleague Dave Friedlos wrote in these pages last week that he is a committed Facebook refusenik. So, in a similar spirit of confession…

* I don’t own a PDA or any form of handheld computer.

* My mobile phone is used almost exclusively for those very 20th century activities, talking to people and sending texts.

* My diary is made entirely of paper and card.

* And although I have a Facebook account, it is used rarely because my virtual friends are also actual, real-world friends whom I regularly contact by another quaint old technology, email.

Many of those friends are surprised to find that I am so un-enabled by IT. ‘But you’re the editor of a technology magazine,’ they say, on learning that my home is not filled with wireless routers.

Frankly, I’m not that interested. Technology for technology’s sake is a complete turn-off. But I can talk passionately about what technology can do to improve our lives. That is rarely what people expect to hear from anyone working in IT.

We need geeks – they are the lifeblood of any industry. But they are still the way we in IT are perceived, and that is wrong and unfair.

Is it any wonder that science and technology subjects have the biggest drop-out rates for university students? Or that the number of young people studying IT continues to fall? All they see is the perception of geeks – still.

Yet there is not one IT manager in the UK who gets away with taking a business case to the board armed with the justification that ‘this new computer is really whizzy and we must buy one’.

IT is about what it can do for your organisation – and only about that. Business technology exists for no other reason than to make companies moure competitive and profitable, and government better at delivering public services. It has no other purpose.

IT managers are the best evangelists for what technology can do, because they think on those terms. Let’s not lose the geeks, but the communicators must be the face of IT or one day UK IT will have no public face to display.

What do you think? Read my blog at: http://editor.computing.co.uk