Why IT Is Not Cool – and Why We Are Doing It Anyway!

Nothing cool about IT

Imagine you open a huge double-door, town-hall style and you step into an arena, a live indoor arena! There are some 1500 people – and?your job is to enter this huge stage they set up in front (huge silver screens overhead) and present the results of your team of the last three months. You worry about the technical setup, about how people will react – but, hey, you have a hall of people listening to the team’s stuff! How cool is that?

… people say there is nothing cool about IT …

• Quick, if I say “IT” what kind of picture do you have in mind? People in front of computers? Strange diagrams people call architecture? A computer game?
• Agreed, IT is one strange place to be! People can show you lines of code. Whiteboards and walls (even virtual ones) full of post-its. Maybe they have a cool app. A third-person shooter. Something that steers a robot. But mainly, things are not “there”. They are inside brains, inside laptops, in the Cloud. And yet …
• A year back I came across ‘Coders’ by Clive Thompson. And ever since I have been wondering: Have we been wrong? What makes IT people tick? Is there something like an IT culture? Why? What does it look like?

What the heck is this thing we call IT?

1?? IT people build the perfect world

Why are there so many nerds in IT?

In 'Coders', Clive Thompson lists “a love of logic, an obsession with efficiency, the joy of puzzle solving, and a superhuman tolerance for mind-bending frustration.”

I’d put it differently (without contradicting, mind): IT people care about building huge, complex systems. The bigger, the better. Huge complex systems which operate under a definite set of rules. Rules which might not even be obvious – suffice that they must be there. It must be logic in the end. The machine doesn’t choose. And isn’t that what nerdiness is all about? To understand an isolated system in all its detail, its intrinsic logic, the results it will produce?

Let’s get back to the town hall, the indoor arena from the beginning!

If you have been at such an event – and not just the presentations but the following 3 to 4 days of work, 1500 people, same location – where everyone tries to figure out the next 3 months of work, chance is you have seen this! You have seen the clockwork!

You have seen people discussing alternatives, options. Facts matter. You have seen how people cooperate, how they come together to solve issues. There is no “Mach denen mal Feuer!” It fits or it doesn’t. You run into barriers, often outside constraints. There is no guarantee for success either. But this is the clockwork! A huge, complex system that in the end will make sense.

Guess what? After these 3 or 4 days it does. It shouldn’t – but it does.

2?? IT is a quasi-creative culture

There is another thing. Ever wondered why so many IT locations are hip offices? Glass walls. Hardwood floors. Coffee machines, sometimes really sophisticated ones. Nerf guns. Walls peppered with post-its. Magazines on coding and IT.

I have been wondering. This is not an automatism. In 20 years in the field, I have been in all sorts of locations. And yet here we are, with IT being in these brilliant offices. Aren’t cellars good enough? That’s an honest question, mind! The logic inside the machines doesn’t care, right? What I have seen, though, is this: Take it away - and you’ll find creativity, performance and problem solving dropping to alarming lows.

My understanding is this: IT is a quasi-creative environment. It needs creative problem solving. It needs innovation. In short, you need the creative environment to foster this creativity.

But what is this creativity good for? Why is it so intrinsic to modern IT?

3?? IT is the Digital - first, forerunner, future!

Let's check this out:

• Digital springs from IT
• The various subchapters of digital (AI, Big Data, IoT, etc.) spring from IT
• Agility (like Scrum or SAFe) springs from IT

In industries where everyone is talking about digital transformation, one of the strangest things we perceive is that IT is not really recognized for its core and vital role. This is even weirder if we understand that this is not over: IT is constantly growing, constantly morphing with new technology, creating new opportunities for business, and accelerating its own assets.?

Let's state it: IT is Digital! There is no Digital without IT! There isn't anyone else who makes digitalization happen! What is even more: IT has developed the methods to be faster than anyone else in the game!

?? And this is why!

IT might not get the credit. People might still think of nerds in hoodies and computers in off-site locations. It’s perception. Under the hood IT creates the future. IT has its own culture. And IT creates a whole perfect world: the digital world.

And that's why we're doing it anyway :-)??