Nerdy Wurdy Wednesday

Nerdy?  Yes.  That's me.  Nerdy.  After all, I do computers for a living and for many years I maintained my own computer lab in the basement, at home, with enough computing power to run several small businesses.  I would experiment there.  I would learn there.  Over time, however, systems have died and/or become obsolete and, because money is a commodity that attracts many demands, there hasn't been the resources necessary to replace or upgrade those systems.

The "Lab" exists no longer.  That said, I do love what I do - if I didn't get paid to do what I do, I would do it for free.  (Shhhh.  Don't tell anybody.) One does have to make money, however, so I am lucky enough to do what I truly love doing for a living.  It's like hardly working at all.

The thing about working in an IT Department is that it is very important to the mission of the company - although it has taken a long time for some Executives to see the Benefit of IT over the Expense of IT.  Fortunately, the company I work for truly understands the importance of IT and sees it for what it is - a Productivity Tool.

In business, there's Income and Expense.  Hopefully, a company has more income than expenses and therefore makes a Profit.  And because it profits, it continues doing business.

Simple.

For a long time, it was very easy to see IT as an "Expense Center".  IT people did not make widgets - they didn't pack them, ship them.  They didn't do cleanup or plant maintenance.  They just did stuff that no one understood to the computer systems and it cost plenty of money to keep them employed.  And if the computers "died", there was always paper systems to fall back on.

Over time, however, computers have become far more sophisticated, the software systems run by those computers have become equally more sophisticated, and computer networks have given those machines an importance and relevance to the corporate mission undreamed of even 20 years ago.

Today, IT Departments sit halfway between Expense and Income.  IT helps the Company to be more productive.  Paper systems as backup processes?  No longer relevant.  Decisions are made quicker, faster and better due to the ability to provide accurate information to those who make the decisions for the company.  Office workers no longer need support staff like file clerks, they no longer purchase unique forms that ultimately need filing, and the amount of physical space needed to deploy an office is subsequently reduced - giving over more physical plant space over to the needs of the Production Department.  Interactions BETWEEN companies are enhanced, as well.  Electronic billing and Payment.  Email.  Web based catalogs.  The list goes on and on.  Imagine what would happen to Business if everything went back to manual systems - not that that would ever happen - as an exercise to demonstrate just how important IT has become in terms of enhancing productivity.

THAT'S what I do.  And that, to me, is amazing.

Ndinombethe.