Martin Courtney

Winston Churchill once wrote, “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

Never a truer word said, so I’d like to thank Simon Hewitt for his letter (Star Letter, 10 December) in response to my recent article on server virtualisation, and to ask Simon to keep up the good work.

Ensconced in the world of publishing, it is often difficult for industry writers to keep what is most important at the forefront of their minds ­ namely the concerns of those at the sharp end of IT who actually use the technology that we like to build up and/or knock down on such a regular basis.

Like one or two of my colleagues here at IT Week, I like to get my hands dirty with a bit of interesting hardware or software now and again; to don the unfashionable “geek” hat and make a genuine attempt to see what all the marketing fuss that surrounds product launches is all about.

This naturally involves taking the trouble to install the thing in question and configure it, if only to check that a) it works properly, and b) it does what it says on the tin.

To keep things in their proper context, and to relate information that somebody working in IT might actually find useful to know, we also try to offer some sort of assessment as to whether this particular solution is any better than the next one, which invariably claims to do exactly the same thing.

Unfortunately, this type of approach is not as common as it should be in the IT press these days, what with the double whammy of commercial pressure and the insatiable black hole that is the web, swallowing every written word that can be mustered on any given day.

But certainly, in an ideal world, IT journalists should spend more time doing the same things that end users do, and less time reporting what IT vendors reckon end users should be doing. And where we cannot physically get our hands on the kit, we should at least attempt to analyse the thinking behind individual technologies, and explain how they are meant to fit into real-world enterprise computing environments.

Because the IT world is so vast, the biggest challenge we face is knowing where to focus. So for all you IT professionals out there reading this article, please remember that IT Week is here to serve, and it is your input that should drive our editorial coverage. It would be helpful to us, and therefore to you, if you gave more of it, more often.