Discussion on:

Don't be premature in closing your help desk

Furthermore, lets create more help desk jobs here in the U.S. I believe there is a unanimous appreciation from all sides of the table when troubleshooting with a person who natively speaks English.

Before Nortel got slammed with too many complaints about overseas telephone support I remember one incident. I called in and got a Level 1 person whose english was actually refreshing / surprising until we started to talk about the problem. I might as well been talking to my dentist as she didn't know what a switch was let alone a failed port.

My only way around this was to ask for the supervisor on duty and request an escalation to Level 2. Level 2 was in North America. Yahoo.

that are much younger than me are good at using the technology or at least the social media part. My 30 something kids do not fully understand when the WiFi goes dead or drastically slows down. Can they fix it? Many times with a great deal of research and effort.

When they are consuming all the bandwidth due to downloads, etc they like most kids do not understand that there are thruput limitations. Try to get a stable thruput running Logmein at a coffee shop. Young adults can run the applications that they use very, very well. Better than I will ever be able to. How those applications work over the network and all the limitations that go with it not likely.

Even todays coders are very, very dumb in this respect. One customer of mine had a group designing a client / server application. Worked well in HQ with 100/1000 to the desktop. When it was put in the field running over a 256Kb link it failed. Why? Well they put very tight response times in the server side. If the client didn't respond in so many milliseconds then the server would drop them. The timers needed to be set up to several seconds to handle the limited thruput of a 256 Kb link. Don't think that such bandwidth limitations exist today? Look at the upload speed of many DSL and lite cable services.

What we may be seeing is a shift in what the help desk does. Less of OS and application assistance and more into the infrastructure to support the applications.

An astutely observant article; "its quite obvious that familiarity does not necessarily breed a deep understanding and troubleshooting capability for the underlying technology." Obvious to some, that is. You hit the nail on the head. It's still nothing short of forehead-smackingly stunning to me just how many people think they're capable of troubleshooting and managing their own technology just because they feel comfortable using apps on their smartphone. Most people these days know just enough to be dangerous. And the attitude you sometimes get from these "power-user" types is just icing on the cake. Yes, folks, amazingly enough, the guy with the electrical engineering degree who can create the software you use actually DOES know more than you do about technology.

The majority of "help desk" techs should be writing knowledge base articles rather than answering the phone.

It's not closing the help desk, it is, as Patrick says, changing the focus.

create worse problems when they try to fix a problem themselves? resulting in *increased* responsibility at the help desk? How many of the self-fixers carefully document what they've tried before they called ?

Highlights perfectly the kind of installations we are seeing of our software of late. Much more focussed on the help desk as a proactive source of knowledge rather than a reactive service provision. Well said Patrick.
www.oxygenhelpdesk.com

all of the studies stating that Help Desk groups should be shut down. Ours runs as a customer/user support function that has had to change as time passes. And we have people in the company that fall across the spectrum in needing support, explanation, assistance or whatever the correct way to say it is.

As technology becomes even more pervasive in companies, there will always be those who need support as they lag behind the technology curve while they maintain their currency on export-import laws, FASB rules, IFRS/GAAP changes and the like. While we rely on them to know the minute details of their areas of expertise, they in turn will call on us when they feel the need to do so.

As some have alluded above, it is sometimes those that profess they need no help that require the most in remedial help.

Until and unless human operated systems (of all types) operate without error, the need for support (of some type) is a foregone conclusion. While I don't agree with Patrick a lot of the time -- well done.

Related to this topic, I have suggested to my current client that an IT initiative be undertaken to educate several thousand users about how to use the support desk (and self-help functions) to their advantage. This is in contrast to the typical "here's the help desk phone/e-mail/url; you know what to do" model a lot of companies employ. The idea is simple: with improved front-end input the back-end result will be faster and better, if not less expensive.

And this goes right along with the BYO craze.

This is a good observation from the author. But as inferred at the end of the article - familiarity does not mean - that the user will be able to troubleshoot a problem in the system. After having managed users for about 10 years in various environments - I have seen that the more IT Savvy the user is - the more complex the problem is. And sometimes - it really becomes very difficult to explain to them the solution - because even a super user of an e-mail like system - does not understand how it works.

As they say - Half knowledge is dangerous - it is very apt !!

When we "review" where to find files, how the computer works and similar basics, students in my classes come up and thank me for the help. Yet there is a belief among administration and other faculty that students today already know the basics. This means that students are assumed to have many computer skills that they don't. Faculty are impressed with what the students can do that the faculty cannot do, but this does not always translate into enough information about how computers works to use them professionally.

I know a lot of people out there who drive a car every day, but don't know the difference between a carburetor and a fuel injection system, much less how to diagnose and fix a problem. A lot of these young kids (for me, that's anyone under 30) can drive their computers at full speed on the information highway, but if they run out of gas, they call a mechanic to fix it for them.