Stop and listen closely. There are voices in your department claiming to know more than your internal customers. These voices say things like, “They don’t see the big picture,” “They don’t have a strategy,” “They don’t know what they want,” and “They aren’t really committed.”
Logic tells us that this “IT knows best” attitude is ridiculous. Few IT professionals have grappled with the challenges of meeting unreasonable profit targets in a tight economy. The tendency for IT to go it alone is really a defense mechanism, fomented by years of trying to serve a distracted and technically unsophisticated audience.
You would have thought that the era of the know-nothing user was over. After all, aren’t we all now using terms like business partner, customer and client? Well, the fact that I still hear “IT knows best” voices and see these behaviors shows that it takes a lot more than wording …