Review of Basic Information and Communication Technology Concepts: Peopleware (Part 3)

Peopleware refers to the human users of computers and information systems. While people may seem to need no discussion, it is actually the peopleware which are the most critical factor for the system to work, precisely because this is the only component which has its own independent thinking.

Computer users may be classified as one of three types:

• End users – This refers to you (probably), me and people whose main role with technology is to use them for our own particular businesses or purpose. These days, with the proliferation of open source software development which sources ideas from the user community, end users play an increasingly important role by communicating their needed features to the developers. 
• Support and Maintenance Technicians – These are the people who are trained to provide support for the end users. These people may have extra knowledge on how to do non-routine functions of your computer or your software (even though the function has always been there), or to troubleshoot and fix the system when it bogs down. For future discussions, let us include in this category people who manage the information systems.
• Technology and Systems Developers – These people write programs, create new hardware and other new technology creation tasks. We have to thank them for their listening ears and creative brains in thinking what we need to make our tasks easier. We also have to curse them for writing viruses, Trojan horses, worms and other malicious software.

Why do we need to identify what type of user you are?

• Communication. If you are an end-user, you usually talk using terms that you are familiar with, and those are basically those that you see on the screen. If you are talking to a support and maintenance technician, chances are that that person will talk to you with lots of highly technical terms, and he probably expects to hear the some terms. (That is why I started with the basic terms in the first few posts). To facilitate communication, I recommend that you talk on that level of techno-lingo. (Of course, this is not saying that technicians have every excuse to use highly technical terms all the time. They themselves must exert effort to make their ideas understandable to the people they are talking with.)
• Asking for help. Using the internet, you can talk to a lot of people and ask them for suggestions if you have a problem. You have to discern who to talk to depending on the issue that you have. If you have a problem with, say, how to do something with your word processor, I don't recommend looking for a technician. I recommend searching for people who use the application. 

In my almost 20 years of using a computer, people think I am a computer science or IT graduate, because I know how to do a lot of things with a computer. I tell people that I know a lot because I use it, not because study about it. There are times that I know more on how to make something happen with a computer application than a computer science graduate, but that does not mean I can create a software.