What's the IT prime directive?

What's the IT prime directive?
by Jeff Davis

Doctors have the Hippocratic oath. The journalist's mantra is
"Accuracy, fairness, and balance." The thespian's creed is "Act well
your part, there all honor lies." Lawyers have—well, never mind
lawyers.

Almost every profession has some guiding moral principle, a set of
written and unwritten codes of conduct by which the majority of those
who practice in the profession abide. What do IT people have?

Getting the IT groove

Although I was punching cards in my college computer classes, I missed
out on the mainframe era. I started working professionally in IT back
when you were a "computer person" if you could read and understand the
20 pounds of manuals that accompanied boxed software. You were a true
geek if you actually enjoyed staring at orange or green monitors all
day.

Now everybody's getting in on the act. High school kids graduate with
MCSE certification. People who never took a typing class are entering
IT careers. They're following the money, and who can blame them?

In my experience, however, there's a problem with many of the
newcomers to the IT industry. Like Don Miguel de Cervantes says of Dr.
Carrasco in Dale Wasserman's Man of La Mancha, many IT professionals
carry their own self-importance "as though afraid of breaking it."
That attitude is what gives computer people a bad name.

The thing we have to remember is that we're in a service industry. We
aren't entertainers. Users don't worship us like actors or sports
figures. They need us, sure, but we need them more. Just because we're
smart and we make good money doesn't mean we're the most important cog
in the corporate machine. Businesses could revert to paper-based
systems and kick us out on the streets, if they had to.

Service with a humble smile

The IT profession is young, compared to medicine, law, and plumbing.
Because the profession is so young, its members have disparate skill,
experience, and maturity levels. We aren't always going to agree on
the best way to install a network or build an e-commerce solution, but
we can come together as a profession to improve our global image. Here
are some examples:

* Don't overpromise and underdeliver. Underpromise and overdeliver.
* Listen more than you talk. Lend a sympathetic ear to users and
clients. Never assume you know what they want.
* Anybody can learn to code or cobble a network together. Get your job
satisfaction out of knowing you're helping people, not just flaunting
your technical skills.

I realize this is common-sense stuff; nevertheless, I'm frankly tired
and ashamed of my IT colleagues who think they're superior to end
users and are impatient with them. Only the folks who provide
electrical, plumbing, and custodial services have a similar
pan-organization effect on people in business every day.

We aren't anonymous faces knocking out steel widgets on an assembly
line. We touch everybody and everybody touches us. From the CIO to the
level-one support tech, our goal should be the same: Give our
coworkers and our customers what they ask for in a timely,
professional manner.

Here's what I propose our IT "oath" should be: "Serve the client well,
there all honor lies." The client is every end user, every customer,
and every person who uses a computer or reads anything printed by a
computer.