decentralized support a fact of life
Your last point is very well taken, In a research study of IT help issues that my students and I did a few years back, we found that (a) probably close to all the "help" provided to organizational users was provided by fellow workers, either in their immediate area or nearby; (b) the quality of this help was rated as at least as good as that provided by IT help; (c) this was related to greater importance attached to familiarity with the work being done than to technology expertise; (d) almost all of this help was provided informally, usually without official acknowledgement or reward, simply because people like helping other people; and (e) where official attention was paid, it was more likely to be in the form of reproach rather than thanks, despite the fact that if all the burden of the informal help system were to be transferred to official IT help channels, the official system would swiftly collapse. The capacity of organizations to punish their people for undertaking the kind of organizational good citizenship behaviors that keep them afloat is endlessly amazing, no less in IT than in any other area of corporate activity.
