The role of the help desk is shifting from fixing what’s broken to teaching users how to avoid problems in the first place.

In a feature in yesterday’s Computerworld (titled “The New Help Desk: Agile, Educational, Efficient”), writer John Brandon highlighted three IT departments and what they are doing to bring the help desk from where it’s stuck – the 1960s – to the present. One of the organizations featured, the University of Georgia, has put an emphasis on using calls to the help desk to educate users. We like that idea.

Click to see a video on creating charts in Excel.

The old way of working is myopic. If you keep fixing an issue that, with a little instruction, can be avoided, where is the long-term value? And, if you cannot – or do not — track where problem spots are, how can you plan for the future?

At PC Helps, we fix stuff too; we’re a help desk, after all. But we also teach customers how to resolve issues on their own, and how to avoid having them crop up again in the future.

In that spirit, today’s post offers tips for creating Excel charts, a topic we receive many calls about. Happy charting.

Creating Charts

By PC Helps Staff

Data (n.) – raw, unorganized facts.
Information (n.) – organized and processed data that can be useful in some way.

When working with a large amount of data, it often can become an overwhelming task to extract information from the data. Excel provides a great tool to facilitate converting data to visual information through the use of charts.

Follow these steps to create a chart: Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Excel, Help Desk, How To, Time-Saving Tips 1960s, computerworld, data

If you thought “consumerization of IT” was just a silly 2010 catchphrase, think again. According to a recent study conducted by IDC and Unisys, 95 percent of information workers use self-purchased technology at work. Unisys is calling it a revolution.

But as with every upheaval, there’s some pain to be had. In the same study, researchers note that while employees are using their iPads, iPhones, Androids and netbooks at work, their employers are unaware of the extent, and have not put solid plans in place to regulate the use of employee-owned devices.

Not only are they on a different page as their employers, they’re in another bookstore.

Here are some of the highlights from the study:

• Employers don’t have an accurate understanding of what and how many consumer technologies their employees are using in the workplace. For example, workers in the survey reported that they are using smart phones, laptops and mobile phones in the workplace at nearly twice the rate reported by employers.
• Workers are using consumer technologies and applications for business, but give their employers poor grades for the internal IT support they provide for these technologies. The researchers found that more than 40 percent of workers surveyed are using text and instant messaging, online communities and blogs for work. Also, industry analysts predict that the number of workers using smart phones for work will double between 2009 and 2014. Yet not even half of employers allow workers to access enterprise applications via smart phones.
• Employees say their employers are more permissive about use of consumer technologies than is reported to be case by organizations. Sixty-seven percent of workers say they can access non-work-related websites, but only 44 percent of employers say their employees can access non-work-related sites. Likewise, 52 percent of workers say that can store personal data on the company network, but only 37 percent of employers say this is the case.
• Employers expect to increase business use of social networking applications significantly in the next year, yet they are not integrating those applications with their enterprise apps and often lack basic guidelines and policies governing the use of social media in the workplace. Forty-six percent of workers surveyed are dissatisfied with their employers’ integration of consumer devices and social networks with enterprise applications. What’s more, 40 percent of organizations surveyed say that don’t have guidelines for social media use in the workplace.

Researchers conclude that, “While [information workers] are intimately familiar and facile with technology, they have little understanding of the security risks, management issues, and policy and governance implications that arise from mass introduction of consumer devices and applications into the workplace.”

In other words, preparedness — that’s IT’s job. And here are some suggestions from the study authors:

• Manage and support these popular consumer technologies;
• Secure critical data and assets against hackers, viruses, identity thieves, and other widespread consumer IT threats;
• Offer the interactive “app” experiences that consumers are looking for when transacting with their suppliers;
• Handle the expected increase in transaction load that these new interactive experiences will impose on the IT infrastructure;
• Attract and retain the new generation of workers entering the workforce.

In a recent post here and on Forbes.com, our CEO Brian Madocks offered his own suggestions. Read what he had to say.

Jenny Sweeney Android, BlackBerry, Customer Service, Help Desk, How To, iPad, iPhone, Mobile Devices, tablets, Windows Mobile

It was about two years ago, and there was a particularly terrible car wreck near PC Helps’ offices in Bala Cynwyd, a suburban town on Philadelphia’s city limits. Someone hit a pole (or something like that) and our entire office building had no Internet or external e-mail.

As a tech support consultant, I rely on Internet access for many things, including, most importantly, remotely connecting to my customers’ machines and being able to search for information about the problems they are having.

(For the record: Our other office in Ohio was not affected, so our customers were fine.)

For a good part of the morning, I had to provide tech support using some innate intelligence I didn’t think I had.

After the initial shock of not being able to see my customers’ desktops and find external knowledgebase articles, I righted myself and successfully made it through the calls.

But the experience stuck with me, and, at the time, got me thinking about how PC Helps functioned almost 20 years ago, when it first switched on its phone lines. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Help Desk, Rants FedEx, floppy disk, Internet, iPad, Mobile Devices

If you read only one article this week (not counting this blog post), make sure it’s this one by CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum – “Enterprise IT’s Top Enemy: Its Own Arrogance.”

An IT department that points and laughs is hardly encouraging learning and business alignment.

The piece highlights the fact that the help desk, despite the growing importance of IT/business alignment in the enterprise, remains in the “condescending gatekeeper role.”

As evidence, Wailgum includes a video that features Andy Bitterer, co-chair of Gartner Group’s BI Summit, doing Jay Leno-style “man-on-the-street” interviews in London. Among Bitterer’s questions to the masses: “Do you use a database?” “Do you know what Business Intelligence tools are?” “Do you know what OLAP is?”

Honestly, does this Gartner bloke really expect everyday people to know what these things are? As Wailgum asserts, Gartner conference attendees may find it amusing (ha, look at the stupid users!), but it really demonstrates how out of touch IT is with its customers. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney FAIL, Help Desk Andy Bitterer, BI, business intelligence, CIO.com, Gartner, Jay Leno, London, OLAP, Thomas Wailgum

The headline of a recent article in Computerworld magazine grabbed my attention: “Help Desks Under Siege.” An image of angry workers armed with flaming torches popped into my mind. They were storming the help desk, calling for an immediate moratorium on rebooting and demanding basic rights like software that doesn’t require patches and updates. There were even rumblings of self-serve password reset capabilities.

A supply closet as an office? For employees who are responsible for the computing capabilities of an entire company? Shame on them.

Alas, the piece wasn’t about corporate coups d’etat (it’s a little far-fetched, I concede), but it did highlight the pressing issues help desks are facing today, in this sorta-kinda-post-recession era. Namely…

1. Efficiency

The piece’s author, Cara Garretson, mentions improvements that would make help desks more efficient, such as a central knowledgebase, remote control capabilities, and a database of standard responses to common problems. The problem, says Garretson, is that those improvements cost employee hours.

They don’t have to.

There are companies out there, outsourcers or “best-of-breed” service providers like us, Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Help Desk Cara Garretson, CIO, CIO.com, computerworld, Customer Service, outsourcers, temps