Your style is to the point and revealing – to your namesake (crueltobekind.org). I think I will become a subscriber and read through some more articles…

Plus there is a lot of pure IT stuff which for example runs the network infrastructure – usually if you are good at that, chances that you are good at UX are slim. And that is fine. To a certain degree you may prove to have enough out of the box thinking and such to move up ranks.

And as well as a normal administrative staff member does not need to understand the whole IT infrastructure nor the processes (they shall just do the work someone else has thought out for them) does the normal geek need to understand the biz side.

On higher ranks though it is mandantory. ;)

Sure, there are people that understand both sides, people that have studied IT & Economics for example.

But there are still some IT staff that just don’t get how users think.
Consider the whole usability issue for example.
If IT would know how users work and think they could get the usability job done beforehand.
But no – there’s a whole new sector of information architects and UX Engineers…

Maybe I’m just too narrow-minded my self, but my impression is that lots of ‘pure’ IT staff don’t really think out of the box.
I’m not as experienced as you are though :-)

We do need such interpreters because both sides have problems with it – mind you my own education is exactly that bridge between the both worlds. As a result, the stronger invested partner in this (which is IT) has to be more sensible when in fact the biz side should be trained.

Take a closer look at probably how few people on the biz side of your internship are capable of understanding basic processes of IT – which is a very dark discovery because biz processes are not structured that different.

@Andriy: Exactly. Sadly there is no way to build up on common sense and understanding, in many cases being so strict and absolut is the only way to go. Biz and IT should be treating each other like adults. If It can learn to only buy gadgets when they are budgeted and necessary, the biz side should be able to do similar the other way round. ;)

Google Apps may find its way into hearts of sole tradesmen (single & family business) but those pay dearly for their mistakes – they just go busted as soon as someone else figures out from their (now publicly available on search) data. And that John from his own buttershop on corner has no clue how Google Apps works, so… Lets see it “in real life”.

And this is exactly what most people of an IT staff just can’t do.
I’m currently in an internship with one of the largest internet retailes in the world and work as a kind of interface between users and IT.
If there wasn’t an interface like this, communication would be much harder.

IMHO, there needs to be an interpreter from IT talk to the user’language and the other way round.