Karen From Accounting Has Decided She Is Also in IT Now
There is a specific professional archetype that emerges in every organization of sufficient size, and they are not malicious, they are not technically incompetent in the general sense, and they mean genuinely well. They have, however, watched exactly enough YouTube videos, successfully performed exactly one self-service technical task, and received exactly enough positive feedback from colleagues who were grateful for any help at all to arrive at the conclusion that they could, in a pinch, handle most of what IT does. They have not discussed this conclusion with IT. They have simply begun acting on it, quietly and with great confidence, and the results are arriving in the ticketing system in a specific form: "I fixed it, but now it's different."
The tell is always the same. The conversation begins with a colleague who has a technology problem. Normal. The problem is within theoretical reach of a non-technical solution, perhaps a software setting, perhaps a connectivity issue, perhaps something that looks like it should respond to the application of confident clicking. Karen from accounting, who successfully connected her home printer to WiFi in 2021 and has not forgotten it, offers to take a look. Forty-five minutes later the original problem has been augmented by three new ones, one of which requires a registry edit to resolve and one of which nobody can explain, including Karen. The colleague is grateful for the effort and apologetic about the outcome. Karen is confident she almost had it.
The instinct of the IT professional in this situation is sometimes irritation, which is understandable and not the most strategically useful response. Karen is not the problem. Karen is the symptom. The reason Karen is in there clicking around is that the path to IT support had enough friction, real or perceived, that a forty-five minute amateur troubleshooting session seemed like a more accessible option than filing a ticket and waiting. The ticket process that Karen bypassed is the process IT built, and if that process is generating Karen-shaped workarounds, that is information about the process rather than information about Karen. The fix is not a memo reminding staff that IT handles IT issues. The fix is a support experience that is easier to reach than Karen is.
There is a second thing worth acknowledging, which is that Karen's instinct to help is actually a version of the thing IT wants to build organizationally: a culture where technology problems are taken seriously and addressed rather than tolerated. The energy is correct. The skill set and the scope of practice are misaligned. The IT organization that figures out how to channel Karen's enthusiasm into something constructive, a power user program, a first-line peer support structure, a structured pathway for the technically curious to develop real capability, gets a force multiplier. The IT organization that just sends the reminder memo gets Karen again next Tuesday, this time with admin rights she found somewhere.
Bless her heart. She's trying to help. Give her something useful to do with that.
