Luddite consultant

I have a confession to make. Yes, I make a living supporting technology, introducing organizations to new levels of digital sophistication. But . . . in my heart, I'm a Luddite. My greatest challenge in business is persuading end-users to embrace the changes I bring to their jobs . . . and yet I find that I resist change as much as they do.

For instance:

• My computers are old, for a techno-geek. I keep them at least two or three years.
• I finally upgraded my personal installation of Microsoft Office to Office 2003 -- three years after it was released.
• I finally wrote my first .NET application . . . four years after the technology was released to production. Until then I had continued to use Visual Basic 6 (now quaintly referred to as "classic" VB) which was released ten years ago.
• As I wrote earlier, I'm still using a five-year-old digital camera, which is starting to get stares of amazement from the late adopters who are sporting cameras half as small with twice the resolution and zoom.
• My boss, Harry, has repeatedly pushed initiatives to get us to use new software: billing software on our PDAs, personal organization tools, new CRM systems like Commence. On every single initiative, I dragged my feet. (Ok, I was actually right to hate Commence, which we eventually scrapped, but that's another story.)

In general, I am perfectly happy to continue using the tools and technologies I have right now, and anyone pushing something new has to make a strong case to push my hand. To some extent, that is consistent with my conscious IT philosophy of "solve the business problem first, then worry about making it pretty." But it's a trend that I would be embarrassed to admit to my customers.