The Weird Business and IT Relationship
The CFO, like some terrible ogre of times past hunches over his desk, staring down the CIO or the director of IT, an open Excel sheet on the monitor between them. The mysterious language of numbers and formulas, pie charts and promises of the awaiting promise of productivity Eden laid bare in a glowing neon highlighted percentage. Just give me the budget the CIO begs. The ogre growls, a deal is negotiated, this ritual dance has been going on for decades.
Corporations still largely see information technologies like yacht owners see their boats; a sinkhole for cash. Most employees have better devices at home than they do at work. The golden promise of productivity Nirvana made in the late 90s is still lurking in the shadows, kept there by the never ending deluge of new technologies; software updates, shiny new devices and now AI. Even the IT consultancies run in a constant state of near exhaustion on the ceaseless treadmill of technological progress.
No business today can operate without information technology. We love it, we hate it. In the mid 90’s, desktop PCs plonked their massive displays on our desks as we kicked the tower underneath with our shoes. Then the wonders of networks arrived. We all bemoaned the insidious blue wires everywhere, hanging from ceilings. We cursed our knees as we had to get down on the floor to find the ethernet socket. Cabling solutions were a mantra. We spoke in hushed terms of routers and servers.
Many a senior executive had one of those hulking, beige monsters squatting on a corner of their desk. The screen most usually dark, a sleeping beast, rarely, if ever awoken. The purpose of that monitor was to suggest an executive that was technologically savvy, who understood the whimsy of a promised new productivity paradigm. Their secretaries brought them their emails, printed out and nicely collated. They wrote their responses on the paper and handed them back. They had meetings to attend. Now the secretary is gone and you’d have to grab that smartphone out of a CEOs cold dead hands.
Information technologies began to change office culture. Instead of faxing jokes around, we emailed them. A lot. We discovered office romances when people accidentally hit “Reply All.” Laptops became ubiquitous as did the cheap black nylon bag we slung over our shoulders.
We dreaded the annual ritual of software updates when the strange, pasty-faced denizens of the IT department showed up to do the installs. Or spent the weekend slipping into our cubicles and offices, the grease of pizza on our keyboards as a symbol of their great work while we slept in Sunday morning. The bright yellow sticky note left on our monitor to change the password surely wasn’t really meant for us? “Hello, IT support? My password isn’t working…”
Then we began to despise the networked printer. Over twenty years later the iconic scene of office lads smashing up a printer in a field in the movie Office Space remains a beloved meme. A tribute to the failed promises of information technology.
The IT department, in their seemingly endless Sisyphean struggle to standardize every device and keep “the systems” safe from hackers and malicious code, curse those SaaS products that whisper their siren song in the ear of the marketing department, “you don’t need IT anymore.”
But humans like to be rebels. We have a very long history of rejecting authority and often just completely ignoring it. We all tweak our email signatures from the company standard, that small act of rage against the machine.
Today, we call the IT folks who live in a locked off, secured bunker in the depths of the office, an LED lit shimmering of machine lights. The answering denizen asks if we have “plugged it in.” We sigh at the well worn humour and its underlying truth.
Eventually, the hooded denizen emerges from their dark, highly secured space, slouches into our chair and does magical incantations with our keyboard and mouse and gestures for us to enter a new password. The sage has spoken, we comply. Now we can get back to fighting that Enterprise software program that sends us into spasms of anxiety and depression.
Someday the IT consultants will show up, khaki slacks, polished shoes, blue Oxford button down shirts, we will be enthralled with PowerPoints. A new iteration of ERP software is looming, we will love it they say. We nod, whispering curses under our breath. We have quietly accepted it is our lot in the digital world of business.
We curse our machines too, the IT department gets the bad rap but we’re not sure why. It’s really not their fault, but someone must pay. Yet we love to personalise our desktops, our mobile phones, we put stickers on our laptop covers declaring our tribal allegiances to apps and gadgets alike. Small rebellions.
Eventually, we spurned the black nylon laptop bag that was a boon to physiotherapists. laptop bags became a fashion statement, part of office culture. Urban backpacks became a thing, a trope of Kickstarter campaigns, padded sleeves and large water bottle pockets on the side. A tucked in pocket for our smartphones with a hole for headphones, now redundant with the rise of wireless earbuds. Progress. When IT shows up to fix something we quietly pray to the digital gods they won’t mess up our desktop configurations.
Now comes the sweet, wafting fragrance of Artificial Intelligence. AI, we are being told by technology’s hallowed marketers, is going to be our best office buddy ever. Workers will be augmented and the drudgery and tedious work of the day will be done by our new sidekick. Humans will be able to exercise their genius. Most of wonder when Universal Basic Income cheques will start arriving.
Businesses will do the AI dance in lockstep the IT dance. It will be as awkward as teenagers at a junior high school prom dance. CIOs and IT folks will act like parental chaperones. There will be those employees who ignore them and work magical incantations that end up creating unlikely solutions that work.
And yet another work cultural shift is evolving. Working from home. We head the sage words of IT as they lay down the rules of VPNs and remind us to watch our passwords. We meet by video now as we did during the pandemic. We mute the mic and turn off the camera, eat our lunch, do a quick workout, buy groceries online. We are gods of multitasking. We love our technology, we despise it. We shuffle on.
