Put ease of use in focus - please!

I have been writing in previous posts about IT Departments that do not understand the importance of ease of use and listening to user needs. David Gurteen linked to a post by Lee Bryant and I found it so funny that I had share it.

"The same IT folks who rail about the "risks" of sharing and online social networking are also responsible for creating systems so unusable and inflexible that they lead users to dump entire databases onto CD and lose them. I think it is fair to argue that IT systems that do no nderstand people are a bigger risk than human-scale web computing that treats people as adults."

(on how UK Customs and Excise could lose two CDs containing 25 million highly confidential Child Benefit records and the bank details of 7.25 million individual recipients)

Here are a few of my own posts on (almost) the same the subject:

• Things that the IT Dept shouldn't be doing
• Rules are meant to be broken
• Is the IT dept not interested in business innovation with IT?
• Enterprise 2.0 and the shrinking IT department