Skills complimentary to your IT knowledge?

I remember doing work experience at a chemical plant and a steel mill in the late eighties (yup, showing my age here). The guy I was shadowing made a point of saying that IT skills alone were not enough to succeed and that I would need to have some complimentary skills and knowledge, such as chemistry or physics. Granted, most of the systems I 'worked' on during this time were process control systems rather than office admin type functions, so his comments were probably true.

I later took a full-time position at that chemical plant (along with a large percentage of the people I went to school with in all honesty) and though I didn't need any specific chemical knowledge, I did have to know a bit about accounting when dealing with the finance people, a bit about warehousing and transport when working with the logistics guys and so on. We spend so much time and effort (and money) on IT training, it is easy to forget that to properly support people running IT hardware and software, you really do need to know a about what they do and how they do it. Otherwise, you are just offering generic advice that may not suit the specific situation.

The same applies at all levels of IT. As a salesman, if you don't understand the requirements of the customers you are selling to, you are going to give them the wrong solution which then has pretty serious ramifications for the relationship going forward. In the almost 20 years I've been in and out of IT, I've learned about finance and accounting, factory production lines, steel fabrication, food processing, legal documentation, airline ticketing, construction and property management ..... I could go on!

So I was thinking the other day about the guy telling me I needed to go and learn about chemistry and thinking he was pretty much spot on - not specifically on chemistry but on needing to know a lot more than IT to be successful in IT. Here endeth the lesson.