As employees we take a lot for granted. We expect things to work and when they don’t we come down on IT and programmers like a ton of bricks without knowing one iota about how these systems work. As for the interfaces, the people who design what it should look like and how it should work are called Business Analysts her at PFL and they catch their share of grief from us as well. “What if we do this?” Why didn’t you think of that?” blah, blah, blah! Again, without one inkling of what it takes to create the systems we work with in the first place!

I’m the training manager, but when I don’t have a training class running I sit with the BAs in our Strategy Execution department and see first hand the work that goes into something like this. At times it’s creative and inspiring. More often than not, it’s tedious and frustrating work with a finish line that, at the same time, looms ever closer and never seems to come into view.

Programmers, well, they’re puzzle masters, aren’t they? These modern-day witch doctors take the storyboards, images, and concepts of BAs and turn them into number, letter, and character combinations that, like some kind of evil-ly good magic, boggle this blogger’s mind as if discovering fire for the first time. I do not question it, I just believe.

So, I’m declaring this “Thank an IT Specialist, Programmer, and Business Analyst Day.” They deserve their own holiday given the amount of grief we give them. And, I’m not sure about BAs and IT folk, but I know programmers REALLY love hugs so throw some of those in as well.