There is an old IT proverb; “Where there are no people, there are no IT problems.” Okay, it’s not really that old and I did just make it up but how many of you programmers, system administrators or even CEO’s have wondered how easy your job would be if you only had to take care of the technology and not deal with the people?
In my earlier days as a GIS tech I wrote a little GIS application to do a property query then produce a nice pretty map all at the push of a button. I was so proud when I rolled the application out to users for testing as I truly believe I had thought of everything and this would end up being a killer application for the organization. It was not to be . . . at least at first. The very first person trying the very first operation ended up breaking it. Despite all my testing, all it took was someone who thinks differently than me and poof! My dream of creating the next killer application vanished!
I decided to embrace my tester’s way of doing things and changed the way my program worked (along with some desperately needed error trapping!). By listening carefully I was able to build an application that not only survived my tester’s onslaught but ended up being something everyone liked to use.
Since then I have, of course, learned to be much better at defining user requirements before going into building an application (or anything for that matter!) but sometimes even that is not enough. It’s easy to forget who we are doing all this for as we get absorbed into keeping up and mastering rapidly changing technology. In the end it really is the people that matter and it’s the technology that is nothing without them. It’s important to remind ourselves of that!
