I’ve had a few of these myself, especially within larger organizations. I’ve negotiated between the Mac people and the Windows people. Mediated between outsourced providers (“incompetent!” say the system administrators) and the in-house staff (“nincompoops!” say the outsourced techies about their clients).
Non-profits are not immune.
Most geeks wouldn’t recognize a critical business process if it bit them on the nose. And though their boss may have “technology” or “information” in his job title, he appears to knows little about either. This is perhaps the most intractable battle in all of IT — the war between the officer corps and the troops.“The biggest conflict is between IT management and IT staff,” says Pratt. “For some reason, the companies I’ve worked for seem to hire or promote people who are not technologically literate. It’s like that person lost a bet or the president of the company has a half-wit brother who needs a job. You have the IT guys in the field saying, ‘You really need to do XYZ,’ and the managers saying, ‘We’re not going to do that; it’s going to cost too much money.’ They’re constantly blocking things that have to be done just because they can.”
tfnp 