Last summer, my wife and I did some remodeling on our home, which has passed from generation to generation over fifty years, and was in desperate need of an upgrade. I did none of it myself – in some municipalities I can be found guilty of assault just picking up a hammer. We paid professionals do it for us: Contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, each with an assistant or two, spent the summer tearing out doors and kicking up dust. Turning a sunroom into a dining room required three teams. Redecorating a bathroom required four. 

Each team had a specialty. The tile re-glazers were specialists. One team (specialists) laid down the hardwood floor, and another finished the floor –a different set of specialists, with different skills. That home remodeling is done by a team is understood by most people (including my wife), but I am a writer with a background in programming, and criminally clumsy, so all of this specialization came as a revelation to me.

The average knowledge worker, sitting at her desk performing whatever task she is paid to perform and relying on her PC to do it, has the same relationship to her computer as I do to home remodeling: Oblivious to all but the obvious, knowing little more than the computer has to be plugged in, the monitor turned on, the mouse and keyboard connected, and the software doing whatever it is the software does. The user doesn’t know about network segmentation and database indexing and .NET assemblies, or any of the other myriad details that IT obsesses over.

Nor does the user understand or appreciate the distinctions between IT employees and the jobs they do. More than any other profession, the differences between IT functions, and the people who perform them, are lost on the outside observer. For her, there is no difference between the person who writes the software, the person who installs the software, or the person she calls when the software stops working. A user neither knows nor cares that the network administrator reports to a different manager than the mail server administrator, or that Sarbanes-Oxley rules prohibit the Help Desk from touching the file server to see if it’s down.

The user’s view of IT is simple: She knows when something is broken.