Why Technology?
Why information technology? Why technology? Why anything?
What Students Tell Me
I ask my students at the beginning of the semester why they want to enter the IT field. These are the typical responses I get:
They want a decent paying job. When you don’t have money (like a typical college student) this sounds great. I do think there’s a problem in the IT field where people choose it ONLY for the money but I also understand a desire to have money to do things. I have money and I use it to buy things or pay off things and it’s nice.
Sometimes students will explain that they have to support their families and they’d be the first people in their family to have a decent-paying job. I can’t argue against that.
They like technology and a job doing technology sounds exciting. It’s a noble reason but sometimes it sets students up for disappointment, because very few technology jobs are as exciting as students are maybe led to believe. These jobs COULD be made more interesting, but the way IT firms are run these days, they’re not. Something happens between the time when a student is in college (typically their early 20s) and when they’re my age (I’m almost 40) that turns people from idealistic to cynical. It’s a shame and I haven’t figured it out.
Ultimately, nobody works for most IT companies or departments because the work is exciting. They do these jobs because they pay well.
I think one of the main reasons why IT departments prove disappointing to many is because IT departments aren’t technology-driven. They’re primarily set up as “order takers” and not as innovators. This is especially true if an IT organization isn’t run by technologically strong individuals.
They want to help people. Unfortunately I don’t get this response very often, but I occasionally get a student who want to work for a non-profit or government agency and sometimes they even know the specific organization they’d like to work for. I used to be one of these students and in many ways I still am, just not as much as I used to be.
So Why Information Technology?
This should be covered in most IT textbooks because it’s an adaptation of what business school is supposed to teach:
Companies invest in information technology for a couple of reasons:
To gain a competitive advantage over other companies in their field.
To close the opportunity gap.
The Opportunity Gap
The opportunity gap is difference between where you are and where you want to be. That’s it. One of the roles of technology in an organization is to close this gap.
A few notes:
In general it is impossible to close this gap, especially in the private sector where firms are constantly innovating and competing with each other. Expectations are always set higher and higher. Whether or not this is a useful system for society is a completely separate economic discussion.
I work in government. Governments do not operate in an environment of constant competition (or at least they shouldn’t). Governments operate with a mandate which is mostly fixed. With government the role of technology should be to implement this mandate as efficiently as possible, both to support the workers and to lower costs.
A theme in my writing is my opinion that, most of the time, technology doesn’t really serve the interests of people. I hope to go into detail as to why I think this is and what we can do about it. One of the reasons IT projects fail is because of unnecessary complexity, both in the implementation of a technology solution and the result of that investment. Modern IT systems are unnecessarily complex. I will go into more detail on complexity in another article.