Making the Most of IT support?

wetfeetl33t asks: "On Slashdot, we've seen quite a few stories about employees who are unhappy with their company's IT department, or are seeking advice on how they can whip their company's IT department into shape. So, enough of the complaints about the supposed stupidity of technicians, the incompetence of sysadmins, or the excessive network down time. A better question is: how can users work peacefully and effectively with their IT department and make the interaction between the IT people and other employees as productive as possible?"

Comments

Let's be absolutely clear about this

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I just want to get this out in the open for discussion because I think your mindset towards 'your work' vs 'their work' is prevalent amongst IT community.

Your job is to make sure the backbone systems of the company are running well enough. This absolutely necessary, and anyone who would argue otherwise is seeking to eliminate your job. Stated another way, your job is to make sure everyone else can do their job effectively.

That said, it also means that if something is working well enough and the users are satisfied with the performance of the backbone, then any upgrades or new system implementations are PURELY egotistical masturbation. What that means, in concrete terms, is that your IT plan which intends to migrate everyone over from the Windows 2003 Active Server server to the Debian Sarge LAMP server that you host in your mom's basement must take a backseat to user requests to reboot their computer.

It boils down to the fact that IT is a loss for the company. It is a net loser which produces nothing that makes money. If someone else in the company can't use their computer because of some IT-administrative issue (lost password, etc) then the company is losing money because they can't make any money with the computer in an unusable state.

The only time IT's tasks should take priority over normal user tasks is in the event of a backbone failure. If the network goes down or some servers go offline or any other bona fide emergencies that must be taken care of immediately, then IT should be able to prioritize the restoration of the backbone over any other request. Once the system is stabilized, then user requests must again take priority over the IT plan.

Discuss.

Re:Let's be absolutely clear about this

[ximenes]

There is a truism involved in all IT affairs: if you ask someone you'll be told "no".

Try it. Ask through the proper channels if you can have Firefox on your PC at work (for instance). You will be told "no, that would be too much extra work for our technicians; we need to have everything be the same on all the machines." They said this because if they tell you yes this one time, it will "set a precedent" that could cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down. They install Firefox for you, now they have to take application installation requests from the 15 people you mentioned that to, etc., etc.

Now on the other hand, make friends with your systems administrator and ask for the same thing in a non-official manner. More than likely you will get what you asked for as a personal favor, because in this case it really wasn't much work to do.

This type of thing comes up CONSTANTLY in the IT field. As in about every five minutes. It applies equally well to much larger scale issues as well. Lets say you need some network ports from the central IT division in this one room. Oh well thats going to be $25,000. Or we could use these unused ports in the room next door by routing long (optical cables, no worry about exceeding the length limit) cables around in a crazy fashion, total price $300. This is a violation of the central IT division's terms, but it not only saved that $24,700 it also made the task possible at all -- if left at $25k it would have been a complete failure.

There is a definite need to circumvent the power structure and bend the rules in most corporate environments if you are focused on getting the results you need. Some people would just shrug and say thats the way it goes; other people come up with ways around it to get what they need. The real point is that there are a lot of worthless rules that clog up people's work, and a lot of inflexible bureaucratic people (particularly in the upper echelons of most IT divisions) who you have to bypass to get any work done. The downfall is that if you're bending rules, you may come to one that really shouldn't have been bent for real.