Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I met with the desktop support services staff twice in the past month. The second meeting, which we had last week, was a longer one and included the staff from the store and the service center. Despite the fact that I had a pretty good idea of the kind of things that this group does, I wanted to understand certain specifics and these two meetings proved to be extremely useful for me.

We are doing an admirable job supporting the whole enterprise despite the increasing complexity of the environment that we are expected to support as you will see below. I met two ex-Wesleyan staff members recently and both told me that they did not realize how well ITS supported them at Wesleyan until they left; the IT support in their current institutions “sucks”…

My concern is the scalability of such a high level of support and how best to position ourselves for the future… 

The first thing that struck me is what I heard consistently – that the support we provide is no longer for just the faculty and staff desktops.

• Laptops have become more common and in many cases it makes more sense to buy them for the faculty and staff than the desktops. Supporting laptops in many cases is more complex than desktops. They are typically taken to other locations (most commonly to the individual’s home) where the configuration requirements to connect to the network may be different; and in some cases, it is also used by other members of the family who may install software which may inadvertantly affect the applications necessary to conduct official business.
• PDAs are becoming common place and because of a lack of coherent University wide plan until recently, everyone gets devices that suits their need. Typically you have Blackberry or Palm Treo, but there are variations in terms of model numbers and the way E-mail is handled by these devices that cause confusion.
• Personal printers – Many users prefer personal printers (either directly connected or networked) over the departmental printers that are in many instances functionally rich. However, the typical complaint is that when one wants a particular document printed immediately, they cannot necessarily do it in a central printer (turns out not to be true, but it is not trivial to interrupt a job and bubble up your request) and also when one wants to print confidential material, the central printer model can pose logistical difficulties.

In addition to the variety of devices that we are being expected to support, Home Computing is adding another level of support issues. Many users take their laptops and work from home. The broadband connections and continued use of Modems pose  a challenge. We all know the standard issues with the boradband issues – configuration, firewalls on the routers, and wireless. How exactly should we offer this support? Going to the homes of the faculty and staff is simply not possible. In many cases, we try to help over the phone, but that has its problems; In other cases we have them bring their hardware to our service center, where we have a broadband connection so we can troubleshoot and solve the problem – in some cases it is very hard to reproduce the home environment so the fact that it works here doesn’t mean it will work at home; In very few cases, the user is unable to bring the hardware here!

As I mentioned before, we are continuing to do an admirable job of managing all of these; The question we are trying to answer is “Are we well prepared to support all these activities at the current levels of expectation with the current levels of resources for the next couple of years?”  Obviously this is a broad and complicated question and we will continue to look at this and tweak what we do. For the short term, we decided to take a few actions which, if you are interested and have access to, can be viewed by going to a wiki that Joanne has created.