Idle Hands are the Devil’s Tools
Support in a Post-UGC World
by Jared Olszko
While cruising around for an answer to a configuration problem I was having this morning, I had an interesting thought. While it is mostly common knowledge to all of us inside the IT community that “Tier 1 Helpdesk” more often than not translates into “Let Me Google That for You”, even those at the top of the tech chain still rely on online search tools to locate instances where others have run into similar complex and unusual problems. Those search tools, in turn, point almost exclusively to online message boards and blogs for the answers to our dilemas. Online message boards who’s content is generated by “The Devil” (aka Users). User generated message boards and blogs are one of the main resources that we in the IT community rely on to get things accomplished when presented with something outside of our comfort zone. We play off of each others strengths in certain areas to form a sort of network brain-trust which helps us all succeed.
But what happens when you take away all of those message boards and blogs? Seriously, think about it. Without going too far into the bills and what they mean (you can follow this to read up on the them yourself), websites will be held responsible for user generated content. Most sites that allow user content will not be able to properly monitor that content and will have to shut down for fear of ridiculous law suits.
I’m not saying that this would completely cripple the worlds IT infrastructure (maybe Tier 1 helpdesk), but getting answers to questions may take quite a deal longer for us to research them on our own to get the answers that we need. In terms of practical everyday business, that would be grossly inefficient. Especially if the problem was creating a network outage where no one was able to get any work done. Aside from putting an extreme amount of pressure on your everyday network admin, this would also end up costing companies a serious amount of dough in a variety of ways.
First off, companies would HAVE to hire more seasoned veterans to run their network and be willing to pay them more in an economy which is still, in some cases, laying people off. Secondly, even with those senior guys at the helm there is no guarantee that they’ll be able to solve every problem that comes their way, and during a network outage every minute of unproductivity translates into thousands of dollars in wages, lost profits, etc etc. In a perfect situation, that would force an almost immediate phone call to a specialized company, for example, Cisco for support. If you have a support contract through these guys, you know that you have alotted a certain amount of time (or tickets) per period and going over those gets quite costly.
Even for smaller issues which only stops one user from being able to work effectively, if the helpdesk is not able to look up the answers easily or efficiently that is still costing the company money. Not to mention, escalation is more likely to occur filling the plates of the senior level IT guys even more.
Even an average user can appreciate this: What would happen if someone called the helpdesk, presented their problem, and the answer they received was “Sorry, we don’t know. Someone is going to the library to look it up.” – While that is obviously an exaggeration, I think you see my point.
So it begs the question. What would we REALLY do without the Googles?