Executive IT Support Specialist

There is a whole new group emerging in the IT Department. Special admins that just take care of executive's PC's. Here is an ad for one at PayPal. I guess this was inevitable. Executives are the drivers of IT architecture. There are so many examples through the ages:

1. Back in the way olden days the MIS department was organized to input data and create printouts on green bar paper to answer questions like: "What were our sales last week broken down by division?" (they did not have Business Units back then :-)

2. Corporate email was deployed so executives could communicate with their kids away at college. Internet was put in so execs could see the company web page.

3. Corporate support for PC's was developed because execs were bringing their personal computers into the office and doing their analysis on those instead of on the PDP-11's. They kept asking for different formats of data on floppy disks.

4. Wireless was deployed and supported because those pesky execs kept installing their own access points.

5. Hand helds, blogging, whatever the next craze is, it will be introduced through the executive suite.

Why is this? Why don't IT departments research new productivity tools and get them in the hands of executives *before* they read about it on the plane? I think I know the answer but I am very interested in your thoughts.