The prosumer problem: Explaining IT to users who think they get it

‘There’s a consumer expectation on an enterprise platform’

Few things rile up an IT team faster than a non-techy trying to explain technology to them.

It's become a common headache as tech has made its way into homes and pockets around the world. Suddenly, everyone thinks they're an expert on mesh networks and storage drives.

On top of that, the proliferation of laptops and smartphones has coincided with a general rise in app accessibility – a trend that hasn't necessarily reached the enterprise yet.

The end result is a workforce that expects IT to behave in a certain way, and gets frustrated when it fails to work like their tech at home.

Who do they complain to? IT, of course.

Jeremy Cooper, head of IT at Apollo Therapeutic, has encountered these amateur technologists in the wild more than once.

"Let's say I'm opening a new site, and we decide that we need localised storage," he says.

"I sit there and go, ‘Right, we're going to buy NetApp, it's going to be 100 grand and it's going to take us a month to install, because we're going to have to validate it, we're going to have to do all this.'

"Someone will be like, ‘You know, you can go to Currys and buy a terabyte of disk for like 50 quid now?' Or, ‘I could have a laptop in your hand within an hour.' Or, ‘Have you seen how quick people build iPad apps?'"

Because modern consumer tech runs so smoothly, the assumption is that enterprise technology should also be "quick and easy." When IT professionals try to explain the difference, other teams "don't always get it."

Application frustration

Software is another bugbear. Even though IT teams tend not to design enterprise applications, they still bear the brunt of complaints.

"In Apple's methodologies, everything's two clicks away. Now, if someone says, ‘I need a new HR system, there's too many steps in this,' it's like, ‘Well, we don't really have control over that.'

"There's a consumer expectation on an enterprise platform."

Explaining what the IT team can – and can't - do, over and over again, is an unattractive prospect. That's why Jeremy advises going to the very top.

"Once you've built trust - whether it's with your boss, or the board, or the leadership team - there is a lot you can start to do; but it's difficult to build that trust, because people don't understand technology, so they kind of push back."

A technical background can actually hold you back here. While it's important to have IT leaders who are also technologists, they need to be able to talk to business leaders on their own terms.

"A lot of us [IT leaders] came from a technical background, so it's difficult to get started with explaining the journey, the value, how it aligns to business goals – versus, like, this is going to give you X uptime or X throughput or storage capacity or something, and talking all the geek speak."

This is yet another case proving that today's CIOs and other leaders need to be able to talk the language of business.