The office Sys Admin. & I have been joined at the hip lately, trying to migrate a web application to its new home--all as gently as possible. The rough edge handed to the users, through me, is a change in process--or, rather, the addition of features that will ultimately make more work for them. They are less happy about it even than I, who have very little sandpaper with which to smooth it. But none of us has a choice in the matter: Mandates are mandates.
I mentioned something of this to Sys. Admin., and he looked frankly incredulous: "You mean none of the stakeholders has had anything to say about it?" he asked. In so many words, anyway--but one of them was definitely "stakeholder."
Now geeks in general, but in particular admins. and programmers, live more literally by letters than numbers, and the accusations of swimming in alphabet soup are more than justified. So when Sys. Admin. used the term "stakeholder" a few times--and regale me with a horror story of how he'd seem similar disregard for the end-user sink an application--I couldn't help but think, "This is the type of person you want in your I/T Dept., all the way up the chain." You can't guarantee that caliber of staff plugging the highest GPAs into the most comprehensive set of troubleshooting scripts--and certainly not while chasing the lowest bid every budget cycle.
(Oh, and for anyone who might be thinking of it: You are absolutely not allowed to hire him away from us. No, really.)
