Another Well Meaning Platitude......
Like "IT Alignement to the Business". Let's face it, IT is and always will be barely tolerated by the organization. No matter how much you lower costs or streamline processes or how many problems you solve for the organization. IT will always be treated like the the bastard child from the poor side of the family. It's the destiny of anything that's infrastructure.
The C-Level execs hire spinless cowards as CIOs why? because all they need is someone to have around and point the finger to when the CEO can't get his iPhone to talk to the ERP. Or when the CEO's "executive assistant" can't print the christmas list for the entire company on the color laser printer.
Add to that the unreasonable expectations users have that IT infrastructure should be like that of the USS Enterprise (without paying a dime for it of course) and we have the current situation.
Marketing personnel are amongst the most unstable, unreliable people around, they call it being "creative". In practice it's impossible, no matter how much social skills you apply to it to reach an agreement with them, because they'll break it as soon as it's written and say it's due to the "creative process", or the "dynamic enviroment modern companies are these days". After several years of dealing with them I very much doubt that. They break their agreements because they can, and usually IT has to suck it up, PERIOD.
Since when push comes to shove, the suits will rather listen to a Mac Fanboi that tells them that with Macintosh you don't need IT departments when they have 1000 workstations to support (and let's not even begin to talk about servers, networking, storage et al), or to some consultant that has never done any production work in his life tell them about how the wonders of the cloud, BYOD, Big Data or whatever came out this morning applies to EVERYTHING. Or even worse to some "Management Consultant" tell them that they're going to transform IT into a profit center with no investment at all. It really doesn't matter what IT does or doesn't do.
The current fad now is telling the suits that they can outsource everything to the cloud and give tablets to the users so they don't need any grumpy geeks to manage their systems. They never actually do it though, they just use it as a negotiation tactic to keep IT salaries low and IT Infrastructure OPEX to a minimum. While of course, forcing IT to give support to the current infrastructure (which is usually falling apart from lack of maintenance) and the flashy new mobile devices.
So "Broadening the Base by NOT studying IT" should mean "stay away from IT profesionally, be a hobbyist".
