My commitment to the concept that IT persons should "know the business" is
not limited to "the EDI World."
I spent ten years on "the other side of the desk" dealing with IT
consultants, contractors and vendors, and to this day remain mystified how
some of them ever came up with a presentation which started with, "I can
help you operate your business ...." when it was blatantly obvious they had
not spent so much as one day on the sales desk, at the loading dock or in
the accounting office.
It's one of the reasons I chose this line of work when I burned out about 15
years ago and needed a change of careers. I figured there were so many
clueless types out there, surely there had to be a need for people who
actually understood the business they were putatively serving.
My first couple of years doing this I worked primarlily as a contractor
through consulting* firms, and the opportunity that gave me to work in many
companies and environments confirmed my original thoughts: While many (OK:
most) of my counterparts had superior technical skills, Moses would have
wandered in the desert for an additional forty years if he had hired one of
these guys as a "navigation consultant."
I remember one guy vividly: He never needed to refer to a syntax manual. He
had memorized the options and parameters for every COBOL verb and VSE JCL
statement ever invented or even imagined. It was a Kreskin-like
demonstration of mastery of minutiae. However, it took me half an hour to
explain to him what "sales tax" meant.
Michael C. Mattias
Tal Systems Inc.
Racine WI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
* "consultant" versus "contractor" , there's another subject. But we'll save
that for another day.
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