Are we spoon-feeding our users too much?

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I wouldn't call that evil at all

I am in the exact same position, and I work hard every day of the week to maintain a useful role for my company. I realize that some holier-than-thou business columnists would rail against techies like you and I who "horde knowledge" or "hold companies hostage" in order to perform some "exclusive wizard-like role" when we should really be empowering everyone to do everything on their own and implementing systems and policies that will render our own jobs obsolete. To that I say: "Nuts."

There are millions of users out there who don't want or need to be empowered. They want someone like us to keep things running for them so they can do their own jobs. They're not interested in recovering their own files from tape backup: they want to notify us of the file name they need and have it reappear in the right folder. They don't care about being able to restore their desktops to a previous version before everything went haywire: they want to dial a number, have us appear, and then go back to work fifteen minutes later. They aren't eager to provision their own Blackberry and get their mail synced up on their own; they would prefer us to get the devices for them, hook it to their mail account and give them a walkthrough on how to use it. Bottom line: IT is a service like any other and if you can provide it for an organization then it serves a very useful function. It's the same with any other department - should employees perform their own financial work or serve as human resources experts? No, because there are departments that do that very thing.

In this day and age when companies now utilize "at-will" employment so they can let anyone go at any time, for any reason; when execs still seem obsessed with consolidating or eliminating positions even as the offshoring/outsourcing craze seems to have faded away; when the economy is in such a frightening state that the nearest comparison is the Great Depression, I wouldn't consider it evil in any way to be as useful to a company as possible by carving out a niche to serve the employees in such a way that you are indispensible. It would be evil to steal company data or blackmail executives; being the "go-to guy" who makes the bad problems go away is just the opposite.

Posted by: mreilly19   Posted on: 01/07/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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