Another Geeks and Suits Rumble

It is a truth held to be self-evident among IT professionals: geeks are from Krypton, suits are from Uranus. The antipathy between members of the code is poetry tribe and the non-IT managers for whom they often work is so common and all-prevailing that it has even become a marketing cliche-like the obnoxious propeller head in the CDW commercials who is always one-upping the guys from the Dilbert cubicles. It's all good natured, of course. Or is it? The proximate trigger for these reflections is the rough treatment that a summary of Andrew McAfee's Harvard Business Review article Slashdot. McAfee's piece is one of those noble attempts to put a framework around enterprise information technology that goes beyond technology to show how IT fits within the broader landscape of organizations and to help non-technical managers understand how to apply it to the business. It is the kind of bridge-building effort that you would assume would be welcomed by the both sides of the corporate digital divide. Not so, apparently. The Slashdoters were inflamed, offering such useful ripostes as "Lucky we have commentary Academe to put us people that actually work in IT onto the proper path. Possibly he would be equally open to our suggestions on how universities should operate" and "I am not the only ubergeek that thinks the IT people should be the high paid personnel and the management asshats should be the underpaid paper pushers that we all know they are. If I had a company all the managers would have to have undergrad degrees in CS or something before they were allowed to get their MBAs." There were a lot more comments, most of them negative. So much for detente. As fellow Enterprise Irregular Comments Tag: