Article ID: PE016
Category: People
Title: As Cool as Rock and Roll

My step-daughter has a new boyfriend. I casually enquired (as Dads do) as to what he does for a living. "I've asked him but I've never understood the answer", she replied. "I think it's something in computers or something boring like that." Then, remembering the profession of whom she was talking to, she immediately apologised - but the point had already been made. It got me wondering about what has happened to this industry of ours. Nowadays, a job in Information Technology is 'something boring'. Twenty-five years ago, when I eagerly joined this business, working with computers was as cool as rock and roll. What happened - and more importantly, can we get it back?

Wouldn't it be something if IT were cool? It would attract determined and capable people, who would compete to join its ranks. It would be populated exclusively by the best of the best. Its members would always be trying to push it forward, find new angles and increase the industry's dominance. These new angles would create career options. There would be ever more money around, as eager self-application generated wealth. Industry membership would be self-regulating, as the unsuited would depart of their own accord. Personal motivation, like the drive to succeed, could be taken for granted. The sky would be the limit. The industry's customers would bathe in its excellence.

Drifting

Instead we have an industry as likely to be drifted into as chosen. One could be forgiven for thinking that IT, and especially user support, is a deliberate career choice for recent graduates and school leavers - we only have to witness the number of companies who put in front of their users, people who have never before worked in either a business, user support or information technology environment, save as an undergraduate user or home hobbyist. But does this mean that user support is a popular profession, or merely a job drifted into by the otherwise rudderless?

Working in user support has some attractions. It is almost entirely reactive, so one can do the work without having to invent it or indeed even think about it too much. Its diagnostic element can present intellectual challenges. Because it involves working with people (albeit usually over distance), it has more variety than jobs centred around a product. It is meaningful because it includes an element of problem solving - so it has its own results and these can come very quickly, often within minutes of the problem having been identified.

As forms of work go, user support has a lot to offer when compared with other industries - it provides spiritual and intellectual rewards without having first to undergo the rigours of training, the humiliation of apprenticeship or the pressures of responsibility. It's an attractive job - not a cool one.

Similar could be said of other parts of IT. Systems support has the benefits of reactivity without the complications of dealing directly with customers. The development side tends to be vocational anyway, so attracts people who made that career choice years before, perhaps in the course they chose to pursue at University. The really difficult and tricky jobs in IT - user management, staff management, process design and procurement administration, for example - will also tend to attract those who are by personality and skill-set most fitted to those positions. But again - that doesn't make it cool.

To get an idea what it might look like, take a look at a currently cool job and try to establish its nature. It's fairly easy to tell what jobs are currently cool - they're the ones mentioned in vox-pop articles in the noisier magazines. So what makes these jobs cool and does their coolness have anything to teach IT?

Cutting Edge

These new industries are at what is nauseatingly often called the 'cutting edge'. They are new, exciting and importantly, attainable. Given the appropriate sort of character, it is perfectly possible to quickly become a part of a young industry, which for its part will be seeking raw talent. There will be few real experts yet, due to industry immaturity - so enthusiasm and energy will be readily accepted as alternatives to expertise.

Is the IT industry like that? Of course, technology is always changing - but if we are honest, we cannot claim to be talking about novelty any more. The best we can hope for in terms of product-generated excitement is in wondering what the next version of something will do. The vast majority of the tools and products this industry will ever need have been invented and all we can do now is improve them.

Cutting edge industries have an aspect of creation about them in terms of the work to be done, roles and functions. Because everything's new, nobody quite knows how to do it, and that includes how the industry itself should be structured and managed. These roles are there to be created by those with vision of how to solve these structural problems. In IT Services, however, the last really new role we invented was the 'IT Services Manager' about nine years ago. Most of the job functions in our industry are at least a decade old.

Cutting edge? No.

Easy Money

Another element of industry coolness is the prospect of quickly amassing a large fortune. You could do that in computers for a very long time - the mid 1960's to the early 1980's - but no longer. If there are large fortunes to be in this industry, they are no longer widely available because the leading edge is so much blunter now. There is money to be made in the application of computer technology - say on the Internet - but that's a diferent subject.

Consider also that even general salaries in user support have been decreasing since the mid 19990's. Furthermore, corporations are looking for ways to decrease IT expenditure. These are the indications of an impecunious and financially cautious industry rather than a freely wealthy one.

Easy money? No.

Cultural Association

Another element of industry coolness is an association with something in the general culture which has its own mystery. In the 1960's and 1970's, computing had that. Imagined technology was everywhere - witness all the Gerry Anderson puppet shows and countless movies. Back then, technology was cool. Nowadays, that coolness is limited to the pursuit of gadgetry. Television proves it - the Noughties' answer to the BBC's 1960's primetime 'Tomorrow's World' is a decidely lesser 'He's Gotta Have It' with afternoon showings on a satellite channel.

Modern day mass culture is dominated by the concept of 'celebrity' - being famous. Just as thirty years ago, the coolness of technology made computing attractive, now the coolness of celebrity spills over onto the jobs associated with it, for example those in the media and public relations. 'Celebrity' has that element of mystery that once made technology attractive. In mass culture, people want to know what life is like as a celebrity, to be the centre of attention and wealth attraction, just as once, people wanted to know what it was like to be able to understand computers.

Information technology does not have that mystery any more. The computer is as ubiquitous and as understood as the video recorder (and probably as frustrating and annoying). And in our whole industry we only really have one mass-market celebrity. And he wears glasses. How dull is that?

This is one seriously uncool industry.

We have to assume we are unlikely ever again to attract people into the industry simply because of its cultural prominence. It's not cool - it's dull, because technology has become ubiquitous. There's no money in it because we have never yet produced a workable cost-benefit analysis for IT, so we cannot justify what the industry is worth. In any case in this writer's view, the wealth is bled out of IT by its own top-heavy, almost monopolous structure which we slavishly accept.

If we want it, IT can be cool again. But we'd have to forego the stability and convention we have built into the industry. We'd have to go back to the technological free-for-all of the early 1980's. Do we want that, with all its associated risk? I doubt it.

But that means we will have to very careful who we hire, because the sort of talent that seeks excitement will probably be looking elsewhere. If we are to pursue excellence, we now have to do it by design rather than default as we could in the days when IT was as cool as rock and roll.

Noel Bruton is an independent consultant and trainer who assists IT Services groups and helpdesks to improve the service they provide. Based in the UK, he has a worldwide clientele since establishing his consultancy practice in 1991. He is the author of 'How to Manage the IT Helpdesk - a Guide for User Support Managers' (ISBN 07506 49011) and 'Managing the IT Services Process' ISBN 07506 57235). He writes extensively in the IT press and is a popular speaker on the IT Support conference circuit.

For more information on on Noel Bruton's services, either call +44 (0)1239 811646 or email noel@noelbruton.com.