The Star Letter in IT Week on 17th September 2007 yet again uses the argument of stereotyping IT professionals as “faceless, introverted IT employees hiding behind the support helpdesk”. At least this time the writer acknowledges this mis-conception.

Whilst we can all laugh and understand many of the gags behind TV programmes such as the wonderful “The IT Crowd” the actual reality is somewhat different with the IT people often being well rounded individuals with high levels of business acumen - at least in my experiences!

The trouble in modern business is that work areas are typically compartmentalised. If you are a HR person you’ll be in the HR department. If you do accounts you’ll be in the Finance department, and if you have a background in IT then more than likely you’ll be in the IT department. And not very often do these barriers come down and departments work together or acknowledge each other.

In fact I’m not aware of many people who can easily cross these boundaries on a daily basis and simply become an ‘all-rounder’ employee rather than a member of a particular department. More often than not these sort of people will be described as ‘loose cannons’ and I wonder how long they will last when their costs need to be assigned to a particular department who doesn’t recognise them?

If what these people are saying is that ‘the traditional IT department is dead’ then this is just nonsense. The very first time the server goes off or the MD has accidentally deleted all his/her email or can’t figure out how or why a virus got on his/her PC then a response of “we don’t have an IT function anymore” or “I’m not sure what the answer is but I have great business acumen” is unlikely to met with a smile and open arms. And a call to the new outsourced IT team that responds with “Have you tried switching it off and on again” or “You have an 8 hour contract - we’ll be over some time tomorrow” may make you think again.

Sure, IT is evolving and IS is becoming a branch of its own with people being able to both take a high-level understanding of systems and business goals and identify ways of melding them together, but lose the techie with their nitty gritty low-level understanding of how things work?

Go on … You’ll be fine … But when it all goes woefully wrong - who will be hiding then?