IT is the doctor

I’ve been privileged to meet IT professionals around the world, and I’m always struck by their many fine qualities. One of the most common of these is the desire to help others. As a group, IT people believe in progress and hold that technology can be an important part of making people’s lives better. At work, we like to see that our products contribute to the efficiency, effectiveness and happiness of users and consumers.

Wanting to help is great, but sometimes we instead seek merely to please. They are not at all the same thing.

When all you want to do is to please your users, you become overly eager to say yes to every request. The problem with that is that requests need to be examined. You have to dig and find out what it is that the users actually want to accomplish. When you do that, you will find often enough that what is being requested isn’t the best way to achieve the real goal — and sometimes it won’t even come close. As IT professionals, we aren’t really doing our job unless we determine what will be helpful, regardless of what was asked for. Being experts in technology carries a professional responsibility to do more than simply fill orders.

Imagine a doctor who, when a patient asks for a prescription for Prozac, instantly responds, “Sure. What dose would you like?” No history-taking, no conversation, no tests. Such a doctor would be guilty of malpractice. No doctor worthy of the title simply fulfills every prescription request that comes her way. Doctors are experts in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and they shouldn’t start treatment until they have performed their own assessment of the patient’s condition.

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