Geeks Versus Suits: using analogies

I read this last week and meant to blog about it back then but only just remembered. A new book titled “The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology Professionals Don't Understand Each Other and Why They Need Each Other to Survive” provides an interesting look at the divide between IT folks and business folks and something I've seen a lot of and I know Microsoft Partners run in to all the time. More and more we see partners selling in to the CEO or business decision maker (BDM to use a Microsoft term) because they find that selling IT to IT folks is hard and the translation of the benefit is lost when the in house IT folks take the message up the organisation.

Given the title of my blog, this quote made me laugh:

"To geeks, a piece of technology is a thing of beauty in its own right, a wonderfully fascinating puzzle. To suits, it's a tool that is only worthwhile if it helps them accomplish their objectives."

I can see where they're coming from but this is just too much of a cliche for me. Geeks and suits *can* get IT together - the geeks have to get better at explaining (in plain English) what the tech does and the suits have to be willing to listen to the potential value (rather than cost) that IT can bring to a business. When that happens, that really is a thing of beauty. It’s something I find myself trying to do a lot - explaining technology be it for business or personal use to people who don’t understand technology. Analogies is often the easiest way as RSS, XML, HDTV, MP3, CPU, Gigahertz and all of that nonsense don’t mean I thing to the vast majority of people. I explained RSS this week to someone as making the web a bit like Sky-TV – you get to choose the channel and can subscribe to the bits you like and have it delivered to you rather than have to go looking for it.

Perhaps a better analogy is one Terry and I discussed a few weeks back - we both sat down for sunday brunch with The Sunday Times and immediately we began sorting it in to the parts we didn’t want to read and those we did. I dumped about 70% of the paper and focused on Business, Sport and News Review. Terry picked other ones and we then scanned through our respective sections quickly. That is exactly what RSS does for me on the web - allows me to take the parts of the web I want and have them filtered to me directly in to Outlook. Of course I still browse as I love the serendipity of the web but RSS is making the web more useful for me.

I tried that analogy at work this week on a colleague who is non-tech and it seemed to work. So my advice to the geek in you – try to turn your technology in to a story that your listener can relate to rather than falling back to type and confusing people with acronyms. It’s tough but rewarding and will help move IT from a cost to a benefit in your organisation. Maybe that idea is in the book but many of the other suggestions just don’t work in my experience.

Link to Geeks Versus Suits: The Great Boardroom Schism

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2006
  I must look this up.  I did a great interview with David Overton for the latest issue of Partner magazine about this exact problem.  In fact most of my writing in Partner is around this topic.  I'll see if I can persuade Nicola to let me post the interview on my blog.