She got to thinking about the reputation of IT again when she heard Christine Ashton, director of IT at UK firm Singlepoint, speak in the 1990s about the growing gap between IT and users. Then finally, a few years ago, she told CIO magazine, she decided to actually start researching the topic of the gap and the reputation of the IT department. The trouble was, the only research on the subject in the academic literature concerned measures of service quality, yet Mann was certain the issue was much bigger than that.

Still, using the many articles that had appeared in the practitioner press helped her develop an academic piece for the Journal of Information Technology Education (volume 1, No. 4, 2002) called "IT Education's Failure to Deliver Successful Information Systems: Now is the Time to Address the IT-User Gap", which depicted the IT-user gap as pervasive and taking many different forms, and described how the gap had become such a problem that many organizations were taking matters into their own hands by creating new hybrid positions to bridge the gap.

"The story might have stopped there with my getting a journal hit and moving on to other research, but pursuing this issue became more important when a disgruntled Washington Post editorialist, Marc Fisher, was angry because he had just been told to use a new information system that was the antithesis of what he needed," Mann wrote in a paper prepared for the Forum on Finance and Technology held in Chicago in September 2004.

Those 874 messages to Slashdot were just the impetus Mann needed to continue her work since it gave her a data set to be qualitatively mined. E-mails in response to the editorial were also enlightening. "In one firm, there was recognition that information technology could be used to create innovative products but time and time again they lost the market because their IT shop was too slow to develop what was needed," Mann says.

"In another case IT became an issue in labour-management negotiations. Workers had become so annoyed with management constantly pushing new systems at them that it became a bargaining issue. According to another e-mail, archivists were trying to move to electronic records systems but were having difficulty working with IT professionals and they asked me to research the issue using federal funding. Further research has revealed that librarians and records managers are having similar problems. This means that even those whose jobs revolve around record keeping are being stymied by the IT-user gap."

There were also e-mails from professionals who had attacked the gap in different ways. One person who had spent several years in the Web development field decided to return to study to obtain a degree in conflict management with a minor in computer science in order to find a position bridging the gap between business and IT. Another wrote of his recognition that being able to talk to the blue collar workers was critical in his movement up the IT ladder. A woman who manages the implementation division for an enterprise system vendor referred to Mann's paper in a presentation to project managers in customer organizations at their Higher Education User Group meeting.

Subsequent research has even led Mann to see signs of the user backlash being fuelled by the downturn in the IT labour market, after one executive talked about user frustration with the high salaries and special benefits enjoyed by IT professionals. "When top management finally stopped being enamoured with IT as the solution, a rapid downsizing occurred in their IT function," Mann says. "This begs the question, how much of the recent downturn is part of the increasing frustration with the IT-user gap?"

Yet during her September presentation, when she asked the audience what makes up the IT function's reputation, no one answered. "Either the question is too simple or they don't know. Most likely both. There are some simple answers but others may be less obvious," Mann says.

"We can no longer put off dealing with the IT-user gap."