Why Most IT Workers Lack Business Knowledge or Critical Thinking

Executive Summary

• IT work has become increasingly entirely technically focused, with little concern for how the business functions.
• A significant reason for this is the IT employers.

Introduction

There is a great deal of emphasis on IT’s technical details, with far little emphasis on understanding what is being modeled. It turns out there are specific reasons for this, which have to do with the way that IT organizations, consulting firms, and IT departments are structured.

The State of Affairs

The state of affairs is described by Loknath Rao, himself, as a long-term IT consultant.

Software firms should resist the temptation of telling the users how to do their jobs. People create pictures and flowcharts in Microsoft word too, knowing fully well that this isn’t the right tool for the purposes. but what matters the most is the purpose and familiarity with the tool. If something is not their primary job, do not tell them about better tools to do their not so important jobs. They are just not interested. The CEO of a customer I worked for never logged into any of the ERP or OLAP systems run and maintained by several consulting firms. A pen and paper guy. He grew the firm from 100Cr to 15000Cr in 10 years. The ones who had access to all the slick tools didn’t know how to use them. The ones who knew how to use them, never questioned why it is set up the way it is. But they are experts at scaring the users. No rationale. No economic consequence. Many of them ended up in the consulting Industry. Production Planning consultants who have never worked in a factory. Sales and Distribution Consultants who have never sold anything. Business Intelligence consultants who do not know what metrics are relevant for the business. Demand Planning consultants who do not know determinants of demand of the products and services in the Industry!

This is a global phenomenon. And I have concluded there is a reason for it, which relates to what IT organizations and vendors value in employees.

What IT Organizations and Vendors Value in Employees

There is minimal career incentive to learn the practicality reality of the business. First, it will put you into conflict with consulting firms and with vendors. Both of these entities claim to have all of the answers in their software. I covered this in evaluating “best practices” in the article How Accurate Was SAP on Containing Best Practices? In the article How SAP Uses Best Practices to Control the Implementation.

The concept of “best practices” has been thoroughly discredited in the scholarly literature, but the IT industry never lets what is objectively true or false get in the way of memes that can be used to drive sales. It is considered entirely normal in IT to lie to your customers. The logic given is that one has to lie because of the lies told by the competition.

The Narrow Spectrum of the IT Field

There are not that many places to work in IT, and they mostly work the same way. For example, our Brightwork SAP Corruption Deception Quadrant covers how one can choose to be ripped off by the multinational consulting firms that function roughly the same way for all intents and purposes. All of them have enormous income and authority inequality, demand a constant stream of foreign workers, and have their websites filled with falsehoods. For their business model, they demand a specific type of worker.

The Perfect Worker for Multi Hundreds of Thousands of Employee IT Consulting Firms

All of the major consulting companies and vendors agree that they want mindless robots to implement their software without thinking about the project.

So, this is what we have.

It is a top-down system where what is “right” is determined at some vendor headquarters and then pushed out to consulting firms. There is no evidence presented in this system. The system works like a Swiss watch to promote projects with very high failure rates.

Gartner is paid to agree that A is true, then A gets “hot,” and then everyone starts doing A. Don’t question if A is true because that does not matter. What matters is selling A.

Conclusion

All of this is why it requires close to zero business knowledge and zero critical thinking skills to work in IT.

Neither consulting firms nor vendors, nor end clients expect it or want it.

They say they do, as most employers will bristle at the idea that they want to employ human automatons. However, as soon as you begin asking them questions, what is true and what is not true, they change the subject or become dissociative. But the behavior of their firms illustrates what they actually value