meaning: The Macer View/20

	The Macer View
	Comment and analysis from Tim Macer Number June 2003

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The Macer View

What's in a name: Time for an attitude shift

One hazard of a career in IT or DP within market research is that cocktail party moment when a stranger asks “And what do you do?” For us, there is no snappy two-word response that will achieve recognition.

Job titles are notorious for being used to aggrandise the lowly and deny the humble truth. The techy side of MR is no exception. We have ‘programmers’ who never actually write programs and ‘analysts’ who never analyse. We have the curiously named spec writers, which even when I started, was considered so lowly a term that my card said ‘survey analyst’. It was pure puff, as I was a cruncher of other people’s numbers. It stuck, because it was hard to think of an alternative that conveyed the notion that the job involved some rational thought.

Job titles do have a currency. The difficulty we have in finding titles on the IT side of market research that are not met with a vacant stare or a cynical smirk is not due to self-aggrandisement, but if anything to internal diffidence and external ignorance.

Now, even the terms DP and IT in research are breaking down. People that ‘work in DP’ are just as likely to be managing real databases and doing actual programming in Visual Basic, as writing Quantum or Bellview specs. They probably know HTML, XML Perl or Java and quite a lot about the messy back-end side of making things happen on the internet.

IT, in some firms, has become an umbrella for all the former DP activities. Some split the activites between IT (the new stuff) and DP (the old stuff). In others, IT means they who fix broken PCs and perform mysterious ‘upgrades’ at unwelcome and inconvenient times.

Last month, I wrote about Nunwood’s tech-savvy research solution for Somerfield. Nunwood is smallish agency where database programmers and web designers far outnumber traditional DP specialists. It is the way of the future. Many smaller agencies now use technology in the hands of the researchers to carry out what in the past would either have been outsourced or sent to DP, and open software is encouraging the shift towards building a business advantage from technical excellence.

But behind the leading edge, we still need an attitude shift in the industry to move away from the deadening assumption that technology is being adequately understood by people who cannot be bothered to understand it, or to ask those who do. And the job titles we need to see more of are for chief technology officers and directors (yes, directors) of IT Services.