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As if IT workers aren’t picked on enough.

The Wall Street Journal’s Tom Weber posted a blog yesterday on a new book by Johns Hopkins’ Romance languages and literature professor P.M. Forni that’s titled “The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude.”

As Weber notes: “Though his new book deals with many kinds of incivility, Dr. Forni has devoted a sizeable chunk of [of the book] to workplace and high-tech rudeness–including two specific explorations of how to handle boorish IT workers.”

Why do workplace and management experts always seem to pick on information technology workers? And why don’t more people in IT find this offensive? Even rude?

Weber did pose the following to Dr. Forni:

“You’ve devoted not one but two examples in your book to dealing with incivility from IT people. Why the focus on IT people? Did you find that IT workers have a particular reputation for rudeness?”

IT people are very task oriented, but this doesn’t make them uncivil. They are very direct. Maybe they are not people persons in all circumstances. But the presence of their discipline is so widespread, I had to give it some important space.”

We here at the CIO Executive Briefing have a different view of the workplace. We have run into a fair share of IT pros and have found the overwhelming majority to be attentive, smart and accommodating to a fault.

Comments (1)

	1. 02-07-2008 20:06
	Across the broad spectrum of IT staff, you will find that the personal styles and interactive capacity of the trade are little different than most service oriented and tasked functions. Often IT staff have difficult responsiblities that can challenge and strain some of the usual relationships in business. For example; If an IT staff member is fixing a technical problem for another business person, that business person is already out of their element and uncomfortable with not being "in control" of something that is important to their tasking. Also, many times an IT staff member needs to "de-tech" their lingo for their peers and this can place them in a more awkward and stilted linguistic scenario.    With this being said, I have historically found a solid majority of IT staff to be very service oriented and accomodating in their relationship with other business segments. Registered

John Stevenson

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