Akademik

n.

The disparity between executives who approve or oversee technological projects that they don't understand and the information technology workers who implement and maintain those projects.

There is a little secret Athey and other computer gurus know: the Geek Gap is shrinking.

Computers have so thoroughly infected daily life that they are losing their long-running mystique. ...

"The average user is using e-mail and downloading music from the Web, and using the digital cameras and e-mailing the images," said Dennis Weiss, an English and humanities professor at York College of Pennsylvania. "They're doing very sophisticated tasks that would have been unheard of 10 years ago."

The Geek Gap used to be so large, it couldn't even be characterized in physical distance. It was almost dimensional, or metaphysical. The technophiles of the world existed on an entirely different plane from the rest of us.

— Douglas Hanks III, "Closing the Geek Gap," The News Journal (Wilmington, DE), February 8, 2000

The solution to the "geek gap," some say, is to encourage IT units to integrate their efforts as deeply as possible into their companies' business objectives. "We really ought to call it information services," said Les Wanninger, a faculty member at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "That provides a metaphor for how we should think about it and how it should function."

— Gregory A. Paterson, "Bridging the 'geek gap'," Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 28, 1998

For the past three years, a leading software company has been inviting Fortune 500 CEOs to a plush resort for a private tutorial about computers. The seminar is an attempt to bridge the gap between executives who must harness technology they don't understand to run their businesses and those who design and manage information technology systems but can't relate it to broader company goals.

In government, the prospect of a private concern picking up the tab for cushy, high-level executive computer training is enough to make members of any self-respecting public watchdog group collectively gag. But the recent elevation of state and, to a lesser degree, local government IT officials to the inner sanctum of public policy makes closing the Geek Gap an important issue for the public sector as well.

— Marilyn J. Cohodas, "Bridging the geek gap," Governing Magazine, February, 1997

stature gap