back to article Employees love their IT departments (almost very nearly true)

Haters gonna hate, but not corporate employees who actually quite like the support their IT departments provide. That’s according to a survey of 2,500 staffers in Australia, France, Germany, the UK and the USA that landed on our helpdesk this week. When asked to give a letter grade, more than 80 per cent of respondents gave …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My IT team is crap, VM servers we use to remote into customers equipment can be down for days when they schedule the MS updates for in hours. Budget is either none existent or equipment is purchased without being tested to ensure it is fit for purpose.

    DR, not sure they've heard of it! May not be their fault as proposals were made but were expensive, probably cheaper than the contract penalties we'd incur for not providing support.

    Fortunately(?) we're a technology company so can fix most faults without going to them ourselves.

    1. Phil W

      "equipment can be down for days when they schedule the MS updates for in hours"

      In fairness to them Windows update can be unpredictable, I've had 2 identical server builds side by side that I've done clean Windows installs on and kicked off the exact same set of updates at the same time and had one finish in an hour and the other finish in 3 hours for no good reason.

      I'm guessing if budget is non-existant they probably aren't paid to do the updates out of hours either.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Hiya Phil,

        Our comment to them is that they've 2 VM hosts, do one at a time. That way we can at least use the one that isn't currently updating! Updates are pushed to the servers and then installed by a schedule, the beginning of the working day (or, at least it appears that way!). I do agree that updates are unpredictable and have very strange ways of working..

      2. Ragarath

        I'm guessing if budget is non-existant they probably aren't paid to do the updates out of hours either.

        That was what I was going to ask, what size company and on top of that budget are we talking here?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Users now expect answers in real-time

    Yep and its bloody disruptive!

    Nothing worse than reading el-reg, then some inconsiderate Luser calls, expecting me to drop everything just because he can't access the CRM, or he's trying to cram a large (2Mb) attachment through the email server.

    pffttt

    1. chivo243 Silver badge

      Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

      2Mb is large? What year is it? Help, I'm lost in the 20th century. Even my parents with ComCrap in the States can send and receive 10Mb ish attachments.

      1. Test Man

        Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

        It's e-mail. Doesn't matter how quick the network connection, any e-mail that can be measured in MBs is too big, as e-mail is generally too inefficient for sending binary. This will always be the case.

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

            The post was trying to be humorous, but obviously failed ;)

            On the 2mb attachment, we actually limit to 10Mb and inboxes are a max of 2-4Gb each, yes its tight, but it stops users clogging up the Exchange database, we have some people who would simply not clean out old stuff if we didn't enforce this - Also we have to archive all emails for compliance reasons.. if we allowed larger attachments, then the Archive would be 4-5x its current size.

            As somebody else pointed out, Email is really inefficient for transferring data!

            1. Naughtyhorse

              Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

              Spoken like a true it jobsworth :-)

              I'm a designer, regularly passing multiple design drawings, at a couple of meg a pop, back and fore, on projects that typically run for a few years - with an obligation to have immediate access to all past mail.

              So 10 meg per mail, and 4 gb inbox works really well for me on both counts.

              here's a bolt of lightning for the blue... how about tailoring IT to suit the business it serves? (yeah I know novel concept)

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

                "Mine handle 50Mb attachments on a daily basis and I think nothing of it."

                "I'm a designer, regularly passing multiple design drawings, at a couple of meg a pop, back and fore,"

                "how about tailoring IT to suit the business it serves? (yeah I know novel concept)"

                Instead of the sarcasm why not think about how to use (/request) the right tools for the job? You ought to be embarrassed about this.

                Emailing your intellectual property around the place is not secure and using email as a change tracking system is not sane.

                It may just be that you simply don't know there would be better ways of doing this and perhaps your IT people ought to be doing more to make you aware but suggesting they should automatically have things work the way you want them to work even though that way is stupid and inefficient does not make you look good and will not encourage talented people to work with you.

                Your IT people will be doing their best to accommodate your wrongheaded way of working partly out of professional pride, partly out of not wanting to have to listen to you whine, but they all think you are prongs.

                1. Naughtyhorse

                  Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

                  well first off it's a financial decision to limit the overall mail box limit. the inflexibility(not everyone sends large mail)... who knows.

                  Requesting anything more than a reset on a lost login is a waste of breath.

                  who said i was using mail for rev tracking?

                  i'm not

                  distributing IP in any form has risk - whether emailing or sending it by bike messenger, or printing it, and folding the drawing into a big paper aeroplane and throwing it out the window, you just have to take a grown up attitude to it (bike it round, but the messenger could be a Russian spy, deliver by hand, but the Chinese might kidnap me). e-mail just happens to be virtually instantaneous.

                  Typical of an IT BOFH-wannabe to know more about how to do my job than I do.

                  If you aint part of the solution... you must be on the helldesk.

                  1. imran m

                    Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

                    Or perhaps the technology professional was imparting wisdom to you, the user, about the technical limitations of a particular technology AT SCALE, and suggesting in an albeit unprofessional way that you explore other options for sharing drawings with your peers. There's this thing called dropbox. It's super cool. Or google drive. Or, if your IT department wants to put the effort into supporting it, owncloud (among many, many other solutions). There are many awesome ways to share files in a RELATIVELY secure way that includes auditing capabilities and the ability to grant and revoke access as needed, or make updates without having to forward out a new copy of the file (which ultimately leads to "which version of the file do I need? i've got 6 of them in my email").

                    It sounds like you think that because you know how to use email, and the various design programs you use, you are some sort of technology guru. You're not though. You simply have enough of a command of the tools available to you to carry out your job effectively. That doesn't mean you have a deep understanding of the inner-workings of the tools, and it doesn't mean that your workflow couldn't be improved through the use of new tools as they become available. You've very likely spent the better part of your life fine tuning your design skills. That's cool. Design is your calling. The IT professionals you seem to hate have spent their lives building and managing the computer systems and software you take for granted every day.

                    So, you do what you do best, and allow the IT professionals to do what *they* do best.

                2. This post has been deleted by its author

              2. ErskineTech

                Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

                "here's a bolt of lightning for the blue... how about tailoring IT to suit the business it serves? (yeah I know novel concept)"

                thats fine what we will do is take your project bonus to pay for the extra storage space needed for that or you know pull it away from some other less important department. then once we have done that we will assign more VM resources to the now struggling mail server grinding the internet speeds to a crawl as the proxy servers now under CPU spec.

                while you do have a good idea think of it more putting out fires very rarely do you get to sit down design a system and then have nothing change the ICT we put in when we started here is nothing compared to what we use it for now

              3. Naselus

                Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

                "here's a bolt of lightning for the blue... how about tailoring IT to suit the business it serves? (yeah I know novel concept)"

                OK. Do you want to ring 1982 and tell them to design the system to handle mutli-megabyte transmissions, or shall I?

                1. Naughtyhorse

                  Re: Users now expect answers in real-time

                  at least in '82 the problem was the tech, now it's policy.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. John H Woods Silver badge

    A little knowledge ...

    ... may be a dangerous thing*

    The key thing, as per the Dunning-Kruger effect, is that what makes "a little knowledge" dangerous is a lack of realisation (usually, but not always exclusively, on the part of the holder) of its exiguity. If one really knows how little it is (i.e. one is aware both of a wider context and one's own relative ignorance) a small amount of knowledge can be quite useful --- not to mention being an unavoidable step on the path to greater knowledge!

    Who wouldn't rather support a user with some knowledge rather than none? It's only once they think they know more than they do that you really start to have a problem. I certainly encourage all the family and friends I support to learn as much as they can about their systems before they call me (even if it's just writing down error messages rather than saying "it's broken").

    ---

    * Yes, I know it's not the original quotation. I was once humiliated in a meeting when I said I had only a little knowledge of the area but I thought I might have an idea, to be rebuffed by someone saying "Well, as Francis Bacon said: 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'" --- you know the sort of guy I'm talking about. What I would like to have said is "Well, I think you mean Alexander Pope, and I think he was talking about a little learning rather than knowledge, but I think you've both made your point and proved it". What I actually managed to do was to stammer out my idea whilst blushing like a halfwit. It was wrong, but the two people whose opinion I really respected told me it was a good idea, so that was some recompense.

    "A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;

    Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:

    There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,

    And drinking largely sobers us again."

    --- An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope

    1. psychonaut

      Re: A little knowledge ...

      jesus mate, sounds like its your version of gazpacho day. maybe you should go get some therapy....let it go, its ok now, and at least you didnt piss yourself.

  4. Yugguy

    I tried to do it myself but...

    The bane of our lives these days.,

    1. Terry 6 Silver badge

      Re: I tried to do it myself but...

      Yes, but "These are the things I've tried" is very useful, if the users do know the limits of their skills.

      I've passed this both ways.

      In doing support for my staff, when the more tech savvy ones would try to resolve the issues themselves, then brief me if I had to wade in.

      And in requesting support when I have concluded that I should escalate the issue to the appropriate part of the IT team.

      And indeed, it works on up. With the IT guy doing the same thing when escalating an issue to a supplier's IT team.

      What doesn't work is when users or IT people get out of their depth.

      Like when we were first given access to a proper IT team instead of me doing it all myself.

      (In those days the teachers who trained teachers to use computers also had to support them, and in some places not much has changed, at least for some parts of what they do).

      And one of their guys came to bring a new fangled laser printer. But he wouldn't leave it to me to install ( I do at least RTFM). Instead he completely f***d the machine up, got toner everywhere and spent an afternoon hoovering black powder from inside and around the machine,while the drum sat exposed to the light, on the window ledge.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Our support desk is pretty good

    I tend to phone support with awkward queries - because I can deal with the simpler ones - and they're always prompt, friendly, and resolve issues as quickly as they can. I like our front line help desk.

    They're even friendly when it's the "I'm sorry, I know what I've done, but I don't have the access needed to fix it" kind of call.

    The problem comes when the question needs to be referred up the chain into the black hole of Big Corporate IT. At that point it will usually get ignored until you invoke a board director's name to get something done. I'm convinced it's because IT is targeted on number of support tickets closed, so they avoid any difficult problems that will take time to solve.

    The other thing that Big Corporate IT does is foist crap onto our PCs that we don't need, doesn't work and makes them boot slowly. Skype for Business, internal large file transfer systems, corporate branding macros for Office...

    So at our place it's a big thumbs up for the hard working guys on the front line. Coupled with borderline hatred for the head office that comes up with policy, pushes out low quality software that nobody asked for and does everything it can to avoid actually meeting an end user.

    1. Naselus

      Re: Our support desk is pretty good

      "The problem comes when the question needs to be referred up the chain into the black hole of Big Corporate IT. At that point it will usually get ignored until you invoke a board director's name to get something done. I'm convinced it's because IT is targeted on number of support tickets closed, so they avoid any difficult problems that will take time to solve."

      It's ITIL.

      ITIL basically means that the IT experts higher up the chain have been cut back to the bare minimum - they cost 50k+ a year and so must be kept constantly busy and few in number. The reason you like your support desk is because they're all customer service munchkins; they don't really know any more about IT than the guy ringing them, they just fill up the queues for the greybeards on 3rd line.

      I was working for one big company a couple of years back. 100,000 end-users, several thousand sites world-wide, 4-5 thousand calls logged every day. The entire IT support department was around 150 people and operated 24/7/365. Of those, around 3 were qualified to program a router. 2 were hardware-certified to work on servers. About 10 had MS certs of various levels. The structure was, roughly speaking, 120 people for 1st line, 25 people for 2nd line, and 5 people to deal with everything else. Those 5 guys were working 12-hour days and still had an 18 month backlog, because no-one else was qualified or had access to the means of fixing their calls. The 1st line guys were all polite, friendly, likeable and sympathetic, but their entire job was to be polite, friendly, likeable and sympathetic - they didn't actually fix anything because they may as well be working for a catalogue company.

      The 'black hole of Corporate IT' is 5 guys trying to run a global company's infrastructure, which kicks up enough problems on its own without individual users complaining about things. If 1st line were taught more than how to change a password, then maybe those 5 guys might not be so busy and might be able to actually deal with things on a day-to-day basis.

      1. LucreLout

        Re: Our support desk is pretty good

        It's ITIL.

        ^^^^

        This.

        structure was, roughly speaking, 120 people for 1st line, 25 people for 2nd line, and 5 people to deal with everything else.

        1st line are in Pune. 2nd line are in Mumbai. And 3rd line are an endangered species, for which there is no succession planning.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Our support desk is pretty good

        Fair comment, but I would say that they don't half make life difficult for themselves.

        We didn't ask for Skype for Business (to take a recent example), it was imposed from on high by centralised IT, who now have to deal with loads of support calls about it because it doesn't work properly. They're the ones who picked SharePoint too. And either built or commissioned the broken file transfer kit we've all got installed.

        Mostly if we had working VPN and an otherwise unmolested laptop, we'd leave IT alone. A lot of calls are to fix broken stuff that users would rather not be using in the first place.

      3. Hollerith 1

        Re: Our support desk is pretty good

        Wow, this is so exactly my experience that I wonder if we were at the same place. We had brilliant local people -- 'quick responders' who had a (small) office on our floor, could see ou within an hour, or at once if something was actually on fire (or were an exec). Bigger problems got punted up to the global team, and there...it...sat. The guys on our floor were constantly badgered and harassed, but they were helpless. Then the decree came from on high that ALL issues has to be dealt with by ticket. So no longer could we walk to the support office to have a quick word. SLA was: response in 24 hours, fixed in 7 days. I actually had calls 4 month later asking 'do you still have that problem?' Well, no, because by then I had done something naughty to fix it myself.

        And the guys on our floor started quitting, one by one. Now I think they have contractors who are dead inside.

        1. Terry 6 Silver badge

          Re: Our support desk is pretty good

          Ours was a bit like that for a good many years. If I couldn't sort something myself I could call up or pop into the office and get a tip, or plan a proper solution to some knotty problem.

          Then they moved into a fortress. And we couldn't phone anyone who knew anything, but a front line phone person who was never the same twice, knew nothing and didn't know who I/we were, in a small local authority education service where everyone (else) knew everyone.

          But we kicked up enough fuss to make sure we always had an assigned person, someone we could trust to fix problems and not make them worse.

      4. psychonaut

        Re: Our support desk is pretty good

        is that the talk talk helpdesk??

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think our IT support tries hard and does as well as can be expected with limited resources, but it's becoming painfully obvious that Microsoft Windows is now essentially chaotic and unsupportable.

    Our Linux patch cycles generally go without a hitch across the whole estate, especially now we've managed to educate our server teams to not apply anything during batch runs and business hours. The same can't be said for Windows upgrades: take any number of identical machines, supposedly with the same build, locked down, same software installed and it's guaranteed they will behave very differently before, during and after a patch cycle. We're just going through a Microsoft Office upgrade: so far the failure rate across identical hardware and builds is around 40%. And of these 40%, the upgrade so borked around 5% of machines that it was deemed easier and cheaper to just replace them.

    Each time our IT support team tell us: "that's never happened before..." - and they're probably correct. Windows pretty much seems to react randomly to external stimuli.

  7. NotWorkAdmin

    Unfortunately....

    While I applaud users attempting to fix their own problems in my experience these just tend to lead to even greater issues that I end up having to fix further down the line when the user has forgotten what they did in the first place.

    Despite the annoyances, I've made it clear at my workplace I would prefer they ask if they're not sure. And made it clear they are, in all likelihood, "not sure" even when they think they are.

  8. TheProf

    Have you tried?

    "employees in increasing numbers are learning how to do their own level 1 support, with 81 per cent of respondents trying to sort out their own IT issues before asking IT for help."

    I've turned it off and on again.

    1. John70
      Pint

      Re: Have you tried?

      "I've turned it off and on again"

      Good old classic...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Have you tried?

        It's even better when you "boot it up" good and hard...

  9. Robert Carnegie Silver badge

    About this IT satisfaction survey -

    Was it, for instances, responses by e-mail?

    Heh heh heh. Heh heh heh heh.

    Responses personally passed by the resident Oneiric Overlord of Outlook, I think you'll find.

  10. Stuart Halliday

    Users can't seem to read or take a photo of the error. But they can tell you the status of their friends on Facebook. Oh hum.

  11. Medixstiff

    It sounds like we have it on easy street.

    Then again when I started 5 years ago, we had no WSUS Server, our HP Data Protect was all screwed up, the two IT guys that left 1 month and 6 months after I started would only VNC to user's machines on the two floors below us and only ever showed up if a Manager screamed.

    The first thing I did when I got there was visit people at their desks - hence why I was nominated three days after I started for employee of the month according to our CIO - because then we could overhear the whining from others about stuff logged months ago.

    Everything was emailed through to the ICT team, so we installed Help Desk software, which improved things immensely and helped win some love from the staff, as they could now see their logged requests.

    I built up the WSUS Server and we got the CEO to approve fortnightly patch nights, which made a huge difference and allowed us to sort out niggling remote access and Citrix issues.

    Then the fun really began, writing all new doco for everything, backups, user access policy, re-doing group policy, building up new Servers and decommissioning the old ones and two years of responding to audit outcomes and undertaking internal and state government audits.

    Then we started the fun of replacing our Intranet that our programmers had created years ago, all of whom had since left, so in went SharePoint, then we replaced our PABX that only allowed 38 people in total be in phone queues, with a decent Call manager solution and wireless headset.

    So it's been a long hard road but we've finally got it all sorted.

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