IT Professionalism

My esteemed colleague Ric Mims and I are authoring an HDI Focus Book on IT Professionalism.

I am reaching out to the HDI community for quotes and lessons learned from your experiences around the topic of professionalism. I have attached the article that Ric and I did that will be used as the introduction to the Focus Book. Download the_essence_of_professionalism.pdf

In short, we have seen the eroding of professionalism in the IT service and support arena that we believe is impacting our ability to work more closely with the business. More importantly, it is impacting our ability to reach our potential in terms business credibility and respect. Ric and I would like position the Focus Book as a workbook for managers to help themselves, help their teams and help their IT organizations change the way in which they represent and conduct themselves as they build relationships across the organization.

The areas we are looking to cover are environment/culture, career, values, ongoing education, communication, customer service, image, relationships and work ethic. I value and respect the opinions, experience and thoughts of the HDI community.

Please take a moment to share with us a quote, a story, a lesson-learned, experience or your perspective on Professionalism.

Thank you! Pete

Comments

[Brandon Caudle]

Pete -

What a great introduction to the book! I would agree that there has been a gradual slide downhill of professionalism for quite a while, however, I will respectfully submit that this degradation has occured not only in the Information Technology industry / arena, but actually across all areas of life.

We see this Generation Slack attitude across (hold on to your seats, everyone) all generations. Yes, I said it, the decline and fall of professionalism is not restricted to our Millenials, or even to Generation X, but rather permeates nearly all ages.

What is particularly concerning is that this seems to come quite frequently from upper levels of management. I just finished reading "It's Your Ship" by Mike Abrashoff and his two decades in the Navy lend strong evidence to this statement.

A final note to this observation is the decline of Customer Service over the past years. Daily, I see success stories as well as failures at all ages and in all demographic areas.

As IT Professionals, we can combat this....write, Pete and Ric, and we shall read!

Brandon - Sacramento HDI