A Kinder, Gentler Help Desk
Two articles came across my desk recently that were not related, but read as if they could have been written as companion pieces under one headline. The first looked at how social networks — and the people who use them in particular — can transform the way we work; the other examined the growing focus on strong people skills in IT.
Nowadays, it’s “more about what gets done than about what you know,” Schaffner writes.
The two pieces together illuminate the shift that’s happening in IT. Help desks are replacing rudeness with customer care, and beginning to see their role as enabling employees to be more productive, rather than fixing computers that have caught fire. This new focus on soft skills goes hand in hand with discovering different, more effective ways of collaborating.
In the first article, which ran in a recent issue of Fortune magazine, Cisco VP of enterprise Alan Cohen discusses how work has changed, from “local to global, from centralized to decentralized.” He mentions the significant investment in transaction systems, including ERP and e-mail, in the past decade to reduce business costs and redundancy. But those systems have had their run, and now it’s time for innovation and productivity to come from people themselves.
Tapping your workforce for productivity gains is even more important now, he argues, because of the state of the economy. Companies need to rethink the notion of work, where it takes place, how it’s done and how employees collaborate.
Meanwhile, at Forbes, writer Mike Schaffner takes aim at publications that run “stupid user” horror tales. (I’ve taken issue with such stories in this blog in the past — see “Setting Aside Help Desk Stereotypes”). Although many of the pieces are intended as humor, he writes, they nevertheless represent the “dark side of IT behavior.”
The notion of users as “lusers” isn’t as prevalent as it was in the past, he notes, and that’s partly due to IT’s shifting role in the enterprise. Nowadays, it’s “more about what gets done than about what you know,” Schaffner writes.
When IT begins to focus on “enabling rather than doing,” real productivity gains will be made. In other words, real innovation and progress will occur when the help desk’s job is to teach users how to correct issues and perhaps prevent them in the future instead of serving as a (sometimes haughty) cleanup crew.
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Great article — this is the difference between bad or mediocre support teams and great ones! How do we take their problems as our own??