One of the things you hear from IT professionals a lot is along the lines of: “waaah, we never get any credit for what we do, and no-one ever notices us until things go wrong”
In fact, it’s a common joke amongst IT pros that you’re never noticed until something breaks.
You know why that is? You don’t communicate enough.
To me, IT – good IT – is just as much about communicating the value you’re adding as it is about actually doing cool stuff and making things run well.
We know the awesome stuff we do on a daily basis, and how great that major new upgrade to the email server is, but unless you’re able to communicate with your user base, and break it down into language that non-IT people can understand, no one is ever going to value IT. Because they don’t see what you do; and they don’t understand how the magical thing you’ve implemented makes their lives easier.``
Communicate the value and the benefits, and you’ll get a much more appreciative user base 🙂
PS. Apologies if you saw an earlier version of this laden with expletives and poor spelling/grammar. I wrote a messy draft on WordPress for Windows Phone and rather than save it to drafts when I hit Save, it seemed to have published it. Anyway, I’ve tidied it up now 🙂