A couple of articles recently caught my attention and sparked my curiosity, particularly the February 27, 2007, article by Shamus McGillicuddy in SearchCIO.com entitled "People Skills Outrank Tech Skills, Researcher Says." Exchanging its Magic Quadrant for a crystal ball, Gartner, Inc. predicts that by "2010, the demand for IT infrastructure and services expertise will shrink by 30% or more...[while] demand for business process and relationship management skills will double." An article by Lisa Von Ahn of Reuters from January 3, 2007, entitled "Programmers to Blame for Hard-to-Use Software," was another.

Just Because Gartner Said So

Everyone in the IT industry acknowledges that Gartner is the 900-lb. gorilla. And when Gartner speaks, everyone listens. After all, Gartner provides numbers, and you can hang your fedora on numbers. Right? Maybe not. After all, who really knows where the industry, let alone the world, will be in 2010? Gartner? Take your best guess.

Many IT advisory services and analysts, including yours truly, have waxed long and poetic on the virtues of cross-training IT employees. We have tenaciously sputtered all kinds of wisdom regarding the benefits of IT people learning skills such as communicating and writing in business language (instead of cryptic hieroglyphs and IT doublespeak) and understanding the business in which they work so they can make suggestions for systems and write programs that are actually relevant and will benefit and differentiate the business. Moreover, we have also suggested over the years that IT people be circulated throughout the business to learn not only new skills, but the perspectives of their brethren, customers, and stakeholders.

Now, however, it's time to suggest something a tad more radical. The imbalance is not necessarily in the IT organization, but rather in the business units. The industry has been in a paradigm shift (funny thing about those paradigms; they're always shifting) for more than 20 years, and the transformation is almost complete. We have moved from the industrial to the information age, and there's no going back.

Some might argue that it is an incontrovertible fact that we have been inured in the information age now for more than 10 years. While that might be true, most people have been in abject denial. Have you ever wondered why customer service representatives (if you can actually connect to a living person) always tell you that the reason for the screw-up with your order or account is a "computer error"? The disenfranchised computer is the premier business scapegoat—bar none. "The computer" has covered and continues to cover for negligence and incompetence. It's time to change all this.

It's the Training, Stupid

Many employees—be they knowledge workers, administrators, customer service representatives, marketeers, salespeople, or even executives—are just not trained in how to use their enterprise application systems or their personal productivity tools. Period. This is not IT's problem; IT has a whole host of other problems, such as keeping the business up and running.

For the most part, it is not IT that decides which applications to implement; it just deploys them. In addition, IT, especially in the SMB, does not have input into setting the magic budget numbers (that is the domain of the bean counters, who know nothing about IT). So it's the business units, which, in their finite wisdom, don't see that budgeting both time and money for employee training is paramount. These people should be replaced with competent people who understand the value of enterprise application systems and the greater value of employees learning how to competently use them. It has been reiterated ad nauseam that businesses don't use upward of 50% of their application capabilities, yet executives continually seek some panacea, simply scapegoat IT, or hide their heads in their tushes.

Many businesses—both large and small/medium—are guilty of this. However, large enterprises have the resources to more readily correct this than SMB organizations do. Larger enterprises also have advocates who are stakeholders and who can endorse and enforce a training edict. Most SMB organizations do not have people with this kind of foresight or clout, and even if they do, many times they are just shot down.

Bottom line: It is not that IT people must learn business skills (they have been evolving), but that business people must learn IT skills to correctly use the IT systems, stop hiding behind ignorance and apathy, and step up to the plate.

Communication, Communication, Communication

The aforementioned article "Programmers to Blame for Hard-to-Use Software" also grabbed my attention and incited my wrath because it portrays programmers as the sole culprits in some geek conspiracy to obfuscate users of their software. Programmers do not program in a void. They are given specs from business units, and then they write code, and then that code is supposed to be tested and put through some kind of QA process. This is pretty much the workflow. If GIGO (i.e., garbage in, garbage out) is the norm, the software company won't be in business long, and/or its customers will vote with their fingertips and go elsewhere to Web sites that are more customer-friendly. Again, if companies would invest the time and money in cross-training their IT people, maybe there would be better software/Web site outcomes. It also helps if the company has some idea of what it wants to promote to customers and prospects.

Executives, whether at software companies or at companies such as Starbucks (which is mentioned in the above article), should be doing more than letting their IT staff run rampant with their Web site. (Hello! The Web site is a company's visage to the world.) Instead, and the resistance to this concept is still invincible, IT should be invited to the table so that all parties can discuss the proposed software product or the corporate Web site and design a workflow through to focus groups, which test and evaluate the finished product. Starbucks certainly spends a lot in advertising; it's not the programmers' fault that the Web site sucks; it’s the business unit's fault that commissioned it and did not follow Marketing 101 protocol and have it evaluated by QA and/or a focus group. Don't these executives ever look at and try to use their own Web site?

Granted, I agree that many Web sites are an exercise in user frustration, and error messages are neither clear nor frankly important (I just ignore them); however, the article mentions Microsoft's text-editing program that "asks users if they want to save their work before they close their document." How much clearer can that be? I disagree with the point made by David Platt of Harvard that the "question makes little sense to computer novices accustomed to working with typewriters or pen and paper...and [that] a clearer question would be: 'Throw away everything you've just done?' " We are in the information age; there is no return to the idyllic and mythical good old days. Get over yourself. Companies must evaluate their employees' skills when they hire them, then train them, and then continue to train them throughout their tenure and as application systems change.

Technology has come a long way regarding user-friendliness. Remember the early word-processors? But there are some things that even technology cannot do, things that run counter to the laws of physics or finite budgets. Although much progress has been made, we don't yet have the capabilities of the Star Trek computer (and today's voice-response units certainly don't have the dulcet and sultry tones of Majal Barrett).

What can be done to ensure that programmers are writing software that is usable or developing Web sites that are user-friendly is to provide adequate training about the company and company policy and goals, communicate requirements clearly, and listen to what the programmers are telling you about what is, and is not, technically couth.

Maria A. DeGiglio is President of, and Principal Analyst for, Maria A. DeGiglio & Associates, an advisory firm that provides clients with accurate and actionable information on business and technology initiatives. You can reach Ms. DeGiglio at mdegiglio@aol.com.