I had the chance to meet up with some of the people working at Espresso while at PodCamp Toronto, and after getting into a brief discussion about what sort of stuff my program covered at Ryerson, Guneet Singh from Espresso made a great point about what’s important when solving problems with IT.  What he said was to look at combining technology and creativity.

In most of my courses we’ve been drilled the message that you need to relate using information technology back to solving a business problem, which is sort of like saying that buying things necessitates having money. Smart people figured that out decades ago (which says something about the people who still haven’t figured it out).

Guneet told me that it’s important to pay attention to how to combine technology with creativity.  Which makes so much more sense these days.  If you look at the bookstores nobody is buying books teaching people why it’s important to use IT to solve business problems, instead, what people are buying are all these books on making those solutions usable, accessible, creative, and simple. Creativity isn’t cultivated at nearly the same rate as more practical skills, and the connection between creativity and technology is simply not taught.

Books like Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, and The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda need to be on the shelves of people who work with IT.

In the end, isn’t finding new ways for IT to solve problems essentially a creative process?

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