IT has a heart (and a strong political preference)
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 by Hugh KennedySince we don’t like to rely exclusively on the insights of third-party research while examining trends, we often conduct research on our own.
Yesterday we released the third wave of our research study on social media and the Information Technology executive, which we conducted with our friends at ITtoolbox. You can download the research here.
This time around, we decided to get a bit beneath the skin of this audience and go beyond simple demographics. So while it was interesting to see that social media and user-generated content continue to grow in importance, it was just as interesting to discover, for example, that:
- Most IT professionals are drawn to the field by a childhood aptitude.
- Fathers were indicated as the most common key influence on the life of the IT professional.
- The biggest headache IT professionals experience at work is not putting out fires or grappling with technology that doesn’t work as promised, but company politics getting in the way of good decision-making.
- The History Channel was selected as the audience’s favorite TV network.
- Globally, IT’s favorite song is “Hotel California.” (Fashion seems to have been getting its Eighties on of late, but IT still appears to be grooving on its Seventies.)
Most interesting to us, Barack Obama is the global candidate of choice for US President, though John McCain records higher scores on international relations. With the conventions right around the corner, it’s interesting that a news source as broad as CNN already has picked up on this tidbit.
More research to come. In the meantime, we’re rushing to prepare our IT Playlist for iTunes.

