In the fast paced, digital age that we live in today, many IT professionals are finding it difficult to keep up with all of the day to day changes. Today’s world is getting more and more globalized and integrated than ever before. The constant need for innovation and high productivity means that IT organizations must be super-responsive to changes occurring at a rapid pace. This means that they must also be prepared for the possibility of not knowing what’s going on, which can lead to some really bad situations such as service downtime or security breaches. In this information technology blog, you will learn about how IT professionals are managing their careers, roles, and teams in order to be prepared for everything happening around them at any given moment in time.
Introduction 1: Personas
In most organizations, the people who actually do support and use the technology are not those who develop it in any meaningful way. In order to find out more about what people want from IT, we spoke to them and developed personas in order to understand how they think of themselves. This is a technique that has been used widely in the realm of marketing because of its ability to help real people be utilized in communication more effectively.
A persona is a fictional representation of an intended audience group. By using personas within our research and development process, we found that we were able to better understand how our current product or service should be pitched to potential users/customers. This has been proven time and time again to help shape the message that is delivered to those who are meant to receive it.
Our research teams have discovered several different personas that are being used in different areas of interest, both business and technical, which can be grouped into two general areas of concern. Within these groups, we found that the following groups existed:
The Curious group: These people often want to know about every little detail of technology, how it works and what happens when. While this is helpful for them in understanding how things work they also sometimes get themselves into trouble by over-explaining situations which can sometimes lead to some potentially conflicting situations which may make others feel uneasy or even angry.
The Expert group: These people are the ones who are often Technical and IT experts who love to tell you what’s happening without telling you how it works. This can lead to some problems because they can be difficult to understand and often go off on tangents that really have little relevance.
The Planner group: These people (often salespeople or sales managers) want a quick answer, but don’t necessarily want to know all the details, and are usually looking at how this technology will solve their problem for them.
Defining questions
Many organizations start with questions in order to define problems in terms of narrow-scope applications. IT professionals have had to answer this question many times, which can be frustrating for them because they don’t always know the answer or they are not clear on what exactly they are supposed to do. As a result, this has led many IT professionals to develop a number of questions that they frequently ask in order to get answers in terms of these areas of concern. With these questions, we have been able to find out more about how different people think and function.
Most of the questions that we asked our research team were pretty straightforward, but there were a few that required a little ingenuity to answer correctly. One of these was’ What do you think happens when IT experiences a problem?’, which was answered in the following way -“Everyone who is involved in technology gets involved in any problems.” While this may not seem problematic at first, consider the fact that overall IT spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on preventative maintenance to avoid these kinds of problems and it would seem to make sense for them to be attempting to prevent such situations from occurring in the first place.
