How Is a Clinician Different from an IT Person?

As an IT person,
users can be frustrating, tunnel-vision paper-pushers unwilling to change and
mired in technophobia and their lack of process understanding. They don't like
to sit in long meetings and, free of the rigid bureacracy of the average IT
department, are startlingly willing to say what they think without worrying
about their career prospects or getting stabbed in the back by an MBA-sporting
CIO-wannabe. IT people hate when people call them, their projects, or their
applications stupid, especially when they are. Users are envied because, unlike
most IT department members, they are not expendable or interchangeable. IT systems
or not, they will be delivering care and don't have to worry about being discovered
as redundant or unnecessary. Patients thank them, even though adminstrators
treat them like massed sheep to be administered only as a group. They can work
at any of several places right in town, making at least equal money without
having to move or travel. They get paid for call, if they take it at all. They
get to wear white coats without feeling like imposters and have jobs more impressive
than being a ho-hum system administrator or DBA whose job could be offshored
or outsourced at any time. Once their work is done at the end of the day, someone
else takes over. They don't care about organizational strategy unless it affects
them personally. They can't name every VP and director because it's irrelevant
to them, they don't go on vendor-paid junkets or present at conferences, they
don't fear the CFO, and they have to eat lunch in the building instead of going
out to restaurants. On the other hand, IT people make more money and believe
that they've kept their self-assessed superior domain expertise while layering
on another rich stratum of technical knowledge, resulting in a Super-Clinician
who now travels comfortably and expertly in either the white coat or the white
shirt crowd.

Clinicians tolerate IT as a necessary evil. Every
policy they enforce is designed to allow users to do less and less with technology:
you can't load software, you can't get a decent PC, and your department is charged
ridiculous rates for poor IT products and unresponsive services whose only allowed
source is the IT fiefdom. The “helpless” desk performance tells
you all you need to know about IT's efficiency. IT people are out of touch,
forgetting that regardless what they once knew or once did, they no longer are
clinicians, they are computer geeks who are operating with questionable efficiency
on the fringes of the organization, hopelessly mired in office politics, executive
ass-kissing, and a self-confident need to talk endlessly (and often “down”
to users) without really getting to the point or knowing what they are pontificating
about. IT'ers are on the Dark Side, their native environment being cubicles
and conference rooms, overly driven by organization charts, job descriptions,
and future promotability instead of just pitching in to get the plainly
obvious work done. They are cautious about what they say, especially in writing,
because the programmer-turned-CIO fancies himself or herself as a decisive Person
of Action, possessing an envied wisdom destined for greater assignments that
results in constant organizational tinkering, firing and reorganizing, and office
jockeying of the tiny 9-to-5 squad, the main result of which is that good
people leave or go back into clinical practice, which doesn't worry the CIO
since they're angling for a new gig somewhere else anyway. Why would you want
to get into IT, the clinician wonders, when you stress out for months over a
single project, you risk getting fired because of poor vendor products or bad
planning even if you did your job, and you get hopelessly mired in detail in
an ugly marketbasket of sure-to-fail projects? You are judged by how many hours
you work, either in the cubicle jungle or dialed in from home. Worst of all,
you doom yourself to a career of hanging around really unsavory geeks who wear
odd clothes, stare at their shoes, and speak proudly in what sounds like a Klingon
dialect (and just may be).