One of an IT department’s responsibilities is to keep people from harming themselves. In some ways, IT is the digital version of OSHA. Instead of keeping ladders from falling on people and boilers from exploding, IT keeps people from getting hacked or from letting people lose track of which of the seven versions of a document people really wanted. Problems appear when an organization tries to use IT to implement safeguards against liability. Liability is a legal issue, not a technical one. For the same reason passwords got co-opted for security purposes when they were originally intended for identity differentiation purposes, legal departments say, “Hey, we can keep people from doing dumb stuff and getting us sued” when in fact people are not doing dumb stuff. Legal just wants the easiest way to mitigate liability. That intention isn’t wrong, but rather misplaced.

How do we advocate for ourselves and the groups we want to promote? A friend of mine showed me an article about Information Technology support politics. As a longtime IT worker, the article disheartened me by ending in the same mistaken way so many advocacy articles do: making a plea to power holders for help. Using IT as an example, let’s talk about how IT advocacy goes wrong, and how to make it right.

Start with a quote from the first page: “When I’m recruiting support people, I don’t recruit them for their technical skills, I recruit them for how they get on with people.” So much yes. If we’re in IT support, we do two things when someone comes to us looking for support: validate their feelings, and help them find an answer. The former is more important than the latter, because Google and other search engines made knowledge much less important than the ability to find the knowledge. That’s why data science is the hottest tech job in the market right now. The issue isn’t finding data (although doing that correctly matters a lot). It’s figuring out how to shape data in useful ways. For IT support, validating a person’s feelings about a problem in turn validates the IT helper, and then both people can proceed to a solution. Continue reading →