These are the easy examples. I can only imagine what kind of digital epics could be filmed and edited - even without special effects - for an SAP or Oracle or Siebel roll-out. Heck, I think there'd even be a decent audience for a 10-minute Bangalore-based documentary that gives employees insight into how their help desk enquiries are really handled. The point: IT needs the discipline of connecting the work it does with the work it enables.

Every IT shop could benefit both itself and its clients by undergoing the rigours of making a movie. The value of being on-site and gathering multimedia material is only outweighed by the challenge of editing that material into a narrative with characters and a theme. Can they do this on their own? Training, guidance and support - whether from talented amateurs or film school graduates - is essential. But CIOs should encourage this precisely because it pushes IT employees to literally take a different view of their work.

I can just imagine a few IT old-timers bellyaching that we don't ask development teams to document their own code any more; we have technical writers. So why try to turn decent developers into less-than-mediocre multimedia filmmakers?

My answer holds: Because literally giving people the tools, techniques and technologies to better understand their customers and pushing them to translate that understanding into usable narratives that inform others is what professional development should be all about. The goal isn't to produce award-winning digital video; it's to produce world-class IT deployments.

Better informed, more aware people produce better software. Just as important, IT customers and clients would now have a visual clue as to how they are seen by their apps and systems providers. These minimovies may be the basis for their own education and training. The most successful of these efforts will turn into desktop video documentation that makes life better for both IT developers and IT users.

The worst of these movies? Well, they'll be painful reminders that telling good stories is hard. They'll be a goad to developers who can now see with their own eyes that they haven't done as good a job as they might in communicating requirements, expectations or accomplishments. That's an important part of professional development too.

Whether IT discovers its own David Leans, Steven Spielbergs or Martin Scorceses is completely beside the point. The issue for CIOs is taking advantage of ever-cheaper and ever more pervasive technology to help IT educate itself. CIOs who really care about developing their people should look them straight in the eye and say: "You oughta be in pictures."

Michael Schrage is codirector of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative