User dumbness is a state of mind

There is a curious split in the IT perception of the computer user. On one level, users are dumb. I don´t mean that IT staff go out of their way to paint users of their systems as idiots. It is more to do with some of the assumptions that go behind some of the systems that get implemented. Rather than automating away the donkey work, they attempt to make decisions on behalf of the user, frequently with little success.