Every workplace has an office tech expert. Someone who knows how to use Excel formulas, can put up a good fight with a gnarly mail merge, and knows what temp files are and why they should be cleared.

They’re valuable people to have on your team. If only more of your employees were so clever with the computer, your business would hum.

Shadow support may seem harmless, but it’s actually taking two employees away from their jobs. That’s double-downtime.

Unfortunately, not everyone’s strength is software or logic — and that’s just fine. (I can’t do my own taxes; that’s why I outsource it to my mother.) However, you cannot continue relying on the office computer guy forever. As much as he saves your office’s collective rear-end on a regular basis, the time he’s spending doing something other than his job is costing you dearly.

There are two types of downtime: unavoidable and avoidable. Unavoidable downtime includes hardware malfunctions or network connectivity problems — problems that will always exist and are really just part of running an IT infrastructure.

Avoidable downtime is where the office expert comes in, and includes shadow support, self-help, and no help at all. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney ROI, Worker Productivity Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, downtime, Excel, mail merge, PowerPoint, productivity, TCO

Historically, CIOs and IT managers have always struggled to prove the value of their investments. During a recession it’s even worse. Budgets are being cut and scrutinized, and IT is often the first in line. Companies want more out of what they already have, which often means evaluating the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for each line item that falls under their umbrella. So what about the costs that are more difficult to quantify and are actually even unbudgeted, like downtime?

TCO studies have identified several key indirect and often unbudgeted costs. One sure cost is end-user downtime, which is separated into unavoidable and avoidable. The former includes hardware malfunctions, network connectivity problems – inherent IT issues that will always exist. The avoidable includes:

• Peer support (also known as “shadow support”) on how-to software issues
• Lack of immediate, expert-level resources for software applications and mobile devices
• Self-help

According to an ongoing end-user survey conducted by PC Helps Support, from 2005 through 2009, end-users estimate that without an immediate, reliable outlet for desktop application support, they would spend an average of 2.7 hours per incident trying to resolve the question or problem on their own.

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Jenny Sweeney ROI, Worker Productivity software support, TCO, Worker Productivity