Trusted trio

It used to be that here were three persons in life one has to trust implicitly: your doctor, your lawyer and your accountant. It’s increasingly clear that this trio has now become a quartet, including the person(s) in charge of your IT.

It’s hard to be both widely and deeply competent in today’s huge technological landscape. It’s nearly impossible even for many people in the IT industry to maintain an understanding of every single technology they use in day to day life.

To take myself as an example, I can code, I know my way around the command line in both the Linux and the Windows world, and I am familiar with the technology stack that powers the cloud at an abstract level. For years, family and friends relied on me as the go-to IT guy and the time is not long behind me when I could answer all their questions with ease.

No longer. The world moves very fast, is very complex, and the only way to keep abreast is to specialize. I specialized in various aspects of IT service design, management and governance. Consequently, I lost my edge as a technological expert.

This means I became a dependent, as most everyone else, dependent on the higher technological literacy of the people around me who specialized in that direction. Where I used to have a self-made water-cooled rig running two operating systems I knew like the back of my hand, I now use the company managed and supported laptop provided by my employer. Whenever it throws a fit, I call the support desk and patiently wait, all thumbs, while they sort out the trouble.

This requires me to trust them implicitly, trust them with the work I just did, the family pictures on the drive, the browser which knows everything about me, and my ability to be productive that day. This is what I mean when I say that your IT person has become every bit as crucial to your life as your doctor, lawyer and accountant. They must know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in order to be able to help you, and once they do, they have a far better understanding of how to leverage that truth than you do, yourself. That’s the whole point of their domain expertise.

As this privileged position of IT support staff becomes more and more evident, greater responsibility will be demanded in return. IT Service providers cannot get away with paper shields, high employee turnover and sub-par internal security compliance. Trust is the coin of the realm, and it’s a rare and precious currency. Customers demand and deserve trustworthiness. Offshoring customer support, running purely scripted calls with disempowered first-line responders, and suffering data leaks all detract from a safe and trusted customer experience.

IT service providers must step up to the plate to earn their place alongside the trusted trio and earn the dignity and respect that comes with that territory.

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