I was unaware of your background and that would force me to change my remarks. Certainly IT is more of a curious bunch. Geeks don't have anything else to do on a Friday night...(sorry, I could not pass that up). While the IT world is more modern thinking and curious (just my opinion) they have to be by nature. Their entire world is moving ones and zeros from here to there in the most efficient means possible. That is a very simple view of what they do, but that is all they do all day. All IT devices are just that. They are appliances on the network that are sending ones and zeros. What it actually does after that is of little interest to the average IT person. Even in that discipline, some are naturally curious and some are not. It is my experience that they don't know and don't really care (unless it is something way cool like 3D printing).
The sheer tonnage of devices that are now on an average network is staggering compared to just 5 years ago and will only continue to multiply. A lot of the perceived curiousity and change and education is being forced onto them by changes in technology and other departments within their own company. Those departments want to leverage the "network" to get the latest greatest capabilities. That puts IT at the center of nearly everything whether they want to be or not. The other part of their discipline is staying ahead of the hackers, and we can all see every day how well that is going.
One poster mentioned how slow our industry has been to change. True to some degree. I too have been around since film cameras. I have seen true analog, tube cameras, solid state cameras, VCR's, DVR's etc. We were once totally independant of networks with dedicated cable runs for nearly everything. Now we largely dependant on bandwidth whether we like it or not. We are driven by the same forces that other industries are - customers. That's why I watch the CES show every year. That is where WE will be next year (Incidentally I can't wait for drones to get here in security; talk about a wow factor!).
Most, not all but most, security companies have to be multi-faceted. You have to have knowledge about your own equipment, electricity, electronics, construction (how a wall and a building is put together), building codes, ADA requirements, and now networks, hubs, routers, servers, Windows, Apple, Unix, SQL, etc. Just layers and layers of stuff. The percpetion is that the average IT guy just takes the cable once it is delivered to him and does his thing (over simplified I know). We often have to do it all. From design to training and back again. The average end-user does not have a go-to IT department person. Fewer and fewer even have anyone on-site. IT now is remote. They don't even have a Facilities group.
Just in sheer numbers, most businesses are small business. More often than not, we are his electrician, his constuction foreman, his project manager and his network group and more. Some AT&T outsourced installer delivers a modem (often times they hide the thing somewhere and for sure put a password in the router) with a network cable and just walk away. The rest is up to us.
Interestingly enough, I tought our first ever "networking 101" class here just this past Monday. That is not to say that we have had no exposure, but that is to say that we now are offically training on it as a group. (We have trained on IT before, just not as a group dedicated to that topic). We have a variety of technicians, each of different ages, each with different backgrounds, experience and interest. The "youngung's" get it quickly, but they don't know why something is the way it is. They have no frame of reference. The older guys struggle, but if it is taught in layers, everyone comes away with an understanding. I wanted to bring everyone up to at least to the same point in their training and hopefully make it easier for everyone to understand not only what they are doing but why things are the way they are. When you use WireShark, this is what that data means. Then once we have a foundation identified, we start from there and build up. There will be much more network training in the future. We only spent two hours on our products. The rest of the day was spent on networks. But almost every time we enter a home or business, we are interfacing with a network of some type, somewhere.
It was important (for some reason I have not fully come to grips with yet) that they all understand the history of where we were, where we are and where we are going. A lot went into security before IT got here. A lot of thought went into IT too. Now they are merging. I wanted them exposed to both at the same time, to see one's influence over the other. I don't want them to be afraid of it. I don't want them to stand there picking their collective noses. I want them to embrace it.
Anyway, I hope that sheds some light on it for ya!