Just had a quick meeting with a friend, who shall remain nameless, who spawned what I think is a great idea.

He works for an IT Tech vendor and gets to meet plenty of interesting IT pros – but always under the umbrella of trying to sell something.

IT folks are smart; they get that there is a symbiotic (or parasitic) relationship between the vendor and the customer, so that’s ok.

Here’s the thought:  if a company REALLY wants its people to understand how the other side thinks, operates, and functions in order to create an empathetic bond that hopefully leads to selling something – then having the person on the vendor side LIVE in that world is probably more legitimate than not.  Huh.

In the industry, we take people from the IT world and put them up on a pedestal to tell others how they became great at what they did by using our stuff.  We take legitimate humans and turn them into props we use to sell stuff.

Why don’t we do the reverse?

Why don’t we make it mandatory training to take our evangelists and force them to actually WORK inside an IT operation for a year or two?  That way, when they speak, they will speak with legitimate authority – not marketing bullshit.

Big IT vendors have big IT organizations – so they could rotate through internal operations – which would probably be hugely beneficial to all involved.  If not, maybe vendors should consider sending some of their team off to camp – have them go work in an IT shop at a non-profit, for example.

Interesting thought.

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