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Technology & Innovation
Techies need a little lovin'
A recent survey conducted by the IT consultancy Touchpaper asked 226 UK end users about their perceptions of the services provided by the IT departments in their respective organisations.
The researchers found that IT support, rather than being understood as an integral part of business strategy, such as sales or marketing, was seen more as a slightly unreliable handyman – a ‘fixer’ of problems that you’d often rather fix yourself; and worse, a ‘fixer’ that often doesn’t get the job done.
According to the survey, almost a third of end users said they contacted IT support everyday, with just under one half (49%) reporting that their problem was solved within a few hours. However, a whopping 35% said that their requests took over 24 hours to be resolved or were not resolved at all, all of which conjures up an image of an ever-swelling backlog of unsolved, unending, techie problems.
In something resembling a council of despair, respondents who were disappointed by the quality of support provided wanted to take the DIY approach and become less reliant of the IT ‘handyman’: 63% of end users said they would like a more automated IT support system to enable greater self-help.
A striking finding of the study was the general ignorance about the role of IT in business. A huge 85% of respondents believed that the IT department’s main function was reactive - maintaining existing systems and providing support when things go wrong. Despite the huge investment made in recent years by global consultancies into developing IT as a key driver of strategy, only 15% thought that IT was central to business innovation.
But it seems that the respondents can’t really be blamed for this. One key finding of the survey was that IT departments were spending so much time carrying out basic repetitive tasks, that their potential to innovate or contribute to strategic planning was being drastically hindered.
Comments
Mike Connor - 15-May-08
This survey doesn't surprise me in the slightest. However, IT is so important to business that I doubt most of the respondents would prefer to work without their businesses' email, servers, desktop PCs, internet access, word processor, spreadsheet software, etc.
If IT departments are just viewed simply as support then it is probably down to one of two reasons - most office staff will only see IT as the guys you ring when something goes wrong and in some businesses, that is all the IT department is tasked with doing; or that the IT department does add value to the business with software and systems but most people in the organisation will be unaware of that function whether through ignorance, apathy or lack of interest; or because the effect is not noticeable in their day-to-day work.
Ideally, an IT department should be balanced with a team of support staff alongside system developers and/or system implementors. However, because of the lack of understanding of IT by many business leaders, most IT departments are underfunded and understaffed and therefore do not have the resources to do anything other than fire-fighting of the latest technical problems.
To add to support staff's woes, technology changes at such a rapid pace that it is a constant struggle to keep their knowledge up-to-date with the systems they are supporting. In addition, software is nearly always released with known and unknown bugs which can become apparent only when installed on millions of PCs, and it then becomes a kind of 'black art' in trying to resolve these issues, with suppliers offering 'suggestions' and workarounds to problems which may or may not solve them, rather than actually fixing their software.
It is no surprise then that support staff can be totally demoralised and feel that their role is a thankless one when they are stretched on a daily basis with people screaming at them to fix their PCs, when they don't have the correct technical help from the people who actually write the software and therefore can appear inept in front of their colleagues when they can't resolve the issue. It's no wonder then that some problems never get fixed.
I'm sure most technical support people would prefer it if the users could perform DIY fixes on their computers, but most likely they would end up being the ones who have to sort out the mess that the user has created in doing so.
Rebecca Roberts - 16-May-08
I think there is a problem of laziness, sometimes staff are on the phone to the IT department before they've even read the error message (which 9 times out of 10 is a result of 'user error' anyway).
Our IT department has taken a pro-active step to ensure that they are not wasting their time fixing day-to-day problems. We now have IT training every week to get everyone up to speed on the most basic of fixes. You might be interested to read about it here: http://www.couraud.com/IT_illiteracy__a_ticking_timebomb_blog12.aspx
This has left our IT department free to concentrate on more important strategic work and the development of our tools.
Andrew Metcalfe - 16-May-08
Rebecca told me she was posting this and I have to say we have certainly had less support requests but "free to concentrate" might be a little excessive!! Only joking, I think having taught the simple fixes and basic computer skills that when people do call up they appreciate more of what we are trying to do and they have fixed a lot of the basic problems. We have even trained on why some things are hard to solve.
Mike is right as well about having teams dedicated to certain tasks. Trying to get your developers to do support as well is a recipe for disgruntlement. Developers will have targets and every time someone spills a cup of tea on a keyboard and they get called that deadline becomes harder and harder!!
Bernard Peek - 27-May-08
What this tells me is that the users surveyed don't have any meaningful IT literacy - I blame the managers.
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