IT addictions

Are you a jargon junkie? Got an insatiable appetite for information? Do you rule over your company's systems with an iron fist, unwilling to yield control until someone pries the keyboard from your cold, dead hands? You're going to have to face it - you're addicted to tech.

Simon Campbell Young, CEO of specialist distributor Phoenix Software, says because technology is so central to how modern organisations operate, and so poorly understood by those outside the IT department, many IT people have fallen into the trap of feeding certain common addictions.

“IT addiction number one is jargon,” he says. “Geeks love their jargon. But an acronym addiction ultimately serves no one well, because IT's role is to back up business operations through the technology. This can't happen if the people running the business have no idea what their techs are telling them. The cure is to develop effective communication skills across all departments in a company.

Another common addiction among IT practitioners is a desire to stick to old methods or products. Campbell-Young says that while it's natural to fall back on the products or techniques you know best, this approach eliminates many of the innovations that could change the entire business. “Letting go of beloved techniques or products can be difficult, but the adoption of mew methodologies or solutions can impact on all areas of the business. After all, if X has served you well since 1970, why abandon it for some newfangled approach? For the same reason people traded bicycles for motorcycles and horses for cars: to get there better and faster.”

Call it the myth of omnipotence. Technology has progressed at such an astounding rate that many have become addicted to the notion that anything is possible - no trade-offs or sacrifices required. Some IT people still believe any problem can be solved if you just throw enough resources against it, says Campbell-Young. If they were only freed from the arbitrary constraints imposed by management, they could have systems that are affordable and always available, massively scalable, instantly flexible, and aesthetically delightful.

They can't.

"If you build something on Amazon Web Services that can do a million transactions in an hour, do you really think you'll also be able to do a hot fail-over disaster recovery site?" he says. "If you've created something that can process really large transaction volumes, do you really think you'll be able to change it every week? If you want it to be massively scalable, you may have to give up having it be highly available."

The cure, he says, is for IT departments to get real. “Develop an IT portfolio that balances risk and reward, and hedge your big bets. People need to realise they can't get there simply by being smarter or working harder," he says. "You can't have it all. You can have anything you want; you just can't have everything you want. The antidote is knowing what the trade-offs are, then trying to get as close to the edge as you can."