Daniel Brent Patton

Product Content Strategy & UX Writing

What End-Users want is to solve a problem, or increase efficiency of a common task. Not only that, they want to solve it without spending time on the solution.  Even technical end-users don’t want to waste more brain cells then they have to on technology.  Why?  Because it’s not their job. We are all spread thin with our day jobs, so adding just one more thing unrelated to core duties is very frustrating.

On the other hand, IT is paid to handle complexity, the more complex the better.  IT puts the technology pieces together, and makes things work.  Once they build something, their job is to maintain the status quo until a new approach arrives.  Not only that, within IT are specialties, those who are great with hardware, those who are great with a particular software package, and those who are great with network security.  The more proprietary the technology, the more specialized the admin, the more security.  At least for now…
via aiim.org

Love this. And the comment thread is brilliant as well. Especially Daniel O’Leary’s “If you were starting a new business today, would you go out and buy servers and hire an IT guy, or would you go all cloud?”