Sage words.

No, not mine, but Jessamyn's. Part of the reason that librarian.net is the one library blog that I go back to over and over again is that sometimes she comes back to something she was talking about earlier and says "I've been thinking about this a little more."

The above linked post is commentary on this earlier one, which links to a few other people's posts about 'how to lose your technically oriented librarians.' (OK, the word they all use is 'techie' a word I despise and hate. Oh, she's a book-y librarian. He's a grumpy old catalogy guy. I'm a librarian who manages a computer-based service.) All these posts are entertaining and speak to a variety of truisms, but the later commentary post tries to get at some of the underlying problems of communication that frustrate people who work building, managing, and mediating computer-based services. And the conclusion that I draw from it is that it is essentially a reference problem. Somewhere along the line conversations are had that fail. Misperceptions multiply. Perhaps feelings are hurt. And then office politics begin. Failed conversations are failed reference interviews.

Go back and read the '50 ways to lose your techies' again and think about this: Maybe we can see that many problems stem from technologly workers not being able to (or given the time to) explain why something should or should not be done. Or it might be the opposite: perhaps an administrator is not listening to the line employees, or is asking for something unreasonable to be done. I've never actually heard someone in a meeting where a technology project was being discussed say "Can you explain to me why that needs to be done?" Or from the opposite direction "What exactly do you want this system to do for you?" These can be any variety of probing, 'please explain to me what you're looking for' type questions. If we spent as much effort trying to communicate with our colleagues as we do with our readers, we might actually get more work done.