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NASA CTO Says Help Desks May Disappear
Lucas123 writes "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has placed its data, from photos of Mars to top secret government information, in 10 different public or private clouds. JPL's 5,000 workers have access to that data with any mobile devices they want to use, as long as it has first been secured. Because JPL's and other workforces are becoming more mobile, a help desk as it's known today may soon become unnecessary, according to JPL's IT CTO Tom Soderstrom. 'Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it,' he said. 'If you can't get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that's the workgroup.'"
I want an ANSWER Desk.
More than 50% of my calls do not get an answer from the foreign sounding "Tony" on the other end of the line.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This is completely out of touch with the real world. Almost nobody Googles such things and most people don't have friends who they can ask about such things. When people have a problem with their mobile device, they call their operator.
Do not mix nerds like you and me who read /. with the actual general population.
Tom Soderstrom. 'Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it,'
If that's true, then why do people keep calling and visiting my helpdesk for help with their mobile device!? "My email isn't syncing" "This thing is too slow" "This java-required website won't work on my phone, but it works on my desktop" "I reset the device like I read on Google and now I lost all of my files and applications"
Speaking as a team lead for tier 2 support group, that's part of the premium service desk for managed IT outsourcing (ASA 30 seconds, 70% FTR kind of thing), this made me laugh my butt off.
Yes, we get crap-tons of calls from users about mobile devices. Tom is out of touch with "real" users, he's suffering (benefiting?) from massive selection bias here. His sample base is nowhere near representative of your average corporate IT user.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
These users will always need a help desk.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Based on my experience as a developer I can assure you people do not "Google or Bing it." They call support first. That's their job, people want answers and they don't want to search for the solution, they want support to search for the solutions. Only the tech savvy Google or Bing to find solutions because they know what to search for. Presuming that everyone has the ability to identify and to solve their own problems is idiotic.
Most of the time I know HOW to fix my problem. When I call the corporate help desk, it's not because I don't know how to fix the problem, it's because I don't have permissions to do it because the box is locked down. Otherwise it's some networking issue which I don't have access to the equipment to fix.
You dial tech support at 1-YOU-ARE-CSOL:
Press one if you'd like to continue in English; 8 if you'd like to continue in Spanish [press]
Please listen to the following menu. Our menu options have recently changed. [a menu that does include anything you want to do is presented] You choose one out of desperation.
Please enter your social security number. [presses...]
Please enter your account number [presses...]
Please select from the following menu, which, wonder of wonders, includes "speak to an account representative" [happy press!]
I'm sorry, that number is no longer in service. Please dial our technical support at 1-YOU-ARE-CSOL. [click... dialtone]
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"JPL's 5,000 workers have access to that data with any mobile devices they want to use, as long as it has first been secured.
Apparently that moron doesn't realize who secured those mobile devices. Hint: Starts with Help, ends with Desk.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Is that a choice people make or is it because Bing is being integrated into IE as default search engine? Last I checked, a very small minority "Bings" it.
level 1 help desk needs to be non tech with level 2 being the real tech desk.
When the corporate exchange server config needs a tweak to make it work better with firefox, or the routes advertised by the VPN are a bit excessive (our VPN routes 1.0.0.0/8, 172.0.0.0/8, and 10.0.0.0/8 via the VPN...joy), or the corporate VOIP client is acting up, or the VM you've been assigned is running out of storage space, then you still need some way to report problems and get them dealt with.
That said, as a teleworker I admin my own linux box because the corporate IT people don't handle mobile linux users (not enough of us to bother with).
...most people don't have friends... ...Do not mix nerds like you and me who read /. with the actual general population.
Are you certain that you didn't mix up the two yourself?
when you fubar it?
HelpDesk!
Think of the type of people who work at NASA. Now think of the type of people who work around you.
Realize that NASA's people are somewhere between slightly more intelligent then the people you work with, to massively more intelligent then the people you work with. Realize that NASA's people are probably smarter then most of the people reading this comment.
Realize what works in NASA's environment likely won't work in the vast majority of the world, not to mention America.
"Bing it" Nobody bings... please let me conduct my experiment, if you "BING" more that twice a day, reply to this message.
You can get rid of level one support desks. The Rolodex flippers are easily replaced with automated systems since they are barely less brain dead than the 90% call volume making use of them. Indeed a Watson style system would be ideal. However, on occasion the other 10% of us need an answer. We need an answer that requires analytic skills and strong subject matter expertise to derive and we don't have the time to do our own research. Of that 10% perhaps another 1% of us need an answer requiring engineering/expert level skills and subject matter expertise. A Watson system might handle level two but never last line of support.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Think of the type of people who work at NASA. Now think of the type of people who work around you.
Realize that NASA's people are somewhere between slightly more intelligent then the people you work with, to massively more intelligent then the people you work with. Realize that NASA's people are probably smarter then most of the people reading this comment.
Realize what works in NASA's environment likely won't work in the vast majority of the world, not to mention America.
First, I don't think that the general employee base at NASA is any intelligent than at any other large government organization.
Second, I work at an organization that has many very smart people - from very bright grad students to PhD's at the top of their field. And they are the ones that need the most hand holding when it comes to IT.
If my "by our lady" mobile device was working well enough to google it, I wouldn't need the help in the "by our lady" first place!
Both ends of this are wrong, at least in the short to medium term: our data's not that accessible, and most things you call the help desk for are not Googlable (if that's a word). Things like JPL's internal policies and procedures, for example -- we have an internal, Google-based search engine, but it's not able to find everything by a long shot.
Also, as it happens, our help desk is very good -- even if it is run by Lockheed Martin -- and it would actually be a shame to see it go away. This might change someday, but right now, humans are irreplaceable.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
If you're not using your helpdesk, it's probably because your helpdesk is ineffective. Not because "you're too smart to use it."
This all sounds all very ivory tower; if you know anything about ITIL you know that helpdesks are most effective when there's a *single* point of contact for all tech issues. As some services move to the cloud this creates even more support & management points. Meaning helpdesk becomes more important for people who want to actually get their work done rather than just trying to self-troubleshoot technical issues.
....they're just rocket scientists!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Mobile just means more legs to potentially call about. If I'm at home, I have to (rarely) call my internet provider. Not because I'm inept, but to report/get status on an outage.
If my work VPN disables my account for one reason or another, I have to call to get it restored.
If my mail server is out (actually hasn't happened to me in the last 8 years), then I'd have to call.
It's not always about what you know/don't know how to do, sometimes you need something done that you can't actually do yourself.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is like the head of a chain of garages saying everyone can dismantle and rebuild their own car engine because everyone who works for him can.
First, I don't think that the general employee base at NASA is any intelligent than at any other large government organization.
Second, I work at an organization that has many very smart people - from very bright grad students to PhD's at the top of their field. And they are the ones that need the most hand holding when it comes to IT.
Of course, the level of support required will also depend on the type and scale of your organization's IT infrastructure. In addition, Google and Bing simply won't help if you're dealing with vendors who don't have a large installed base or online documentation.
What I'm trying to say is that NASA is such a unique environment, they shouldn't be suggesting that what works for them will work for the rest of the world.
I find the opposite to be true.
I've been in the IT industry for somewhere around 15 years. I've worked on help desks. I've done vertical systems support. I've done software testing. I've been a developer. Presently I'm working part time on a help desk while putting myself through grad school.
Smart people generally need less help and the help they need is generally along the lines of being pushed in the right direction rather than being hand-held through the process.
But perhaps you're conflating being highly educated with being smart. It is true that there are quite a few highly educated people that aren't much smarter than a box of rocks.
CS for help desk? even more so if it's a call center driven by call times.
Even desktop support and IT admin work is very hands on and needs skills that you don't get in a 4 CS degrees.
It's like saying people in the cable system call center need a 4 year degrees in Telecommunication just to tell some one to reboot there modem
and saying that a cable guy needs a EE or Telecommunications degree for a very hand on job that is a good fit for some kind tech school and or an apprentices system.
Windows 7 Home
with Nvidia Geforce
updated today
As long as NASA CTOs still think a VPN is all you need to secure a device, the military will continue to operate the practical (and functional) national space program.
Military scientists who use real secret satellite and spacecraft information have a very real problem in acquiring mobile electronics which are actually secure. And we do use a help desk...
Now maybe NASA can help convince the military brass that absolute security is a pipe dream, but using examples where scientists "get a free ipad" for doing their job is only going to convince the military that NASA is full of waste, fraud and abuse. Note that he did not say the scientist needed an ipad, but literally that he just got a free ipad. That's mind boggling to me. Why do we keep these guys around?
> It's like saying people in the cable system call center need a 4 year degrees in Telecommunication just to tell some one to reboot there modem
Yeah, ok, but the moment it's something that can't be solved by rebooting the modem, a procedure-oriented helpdesk person is often stuck. You get into a situation where a support person is condescendingly giving basic instructions that don't help over and over again to a user who may know more about the product than the support person. Like the corporate flunky who insisted that I reenter the corporate information into my Blackberry over and over and over again when I could *see* that the BB enterprise server was not answering a ping.
This kind of stuff gives us power users the impression that you service folks are morons. And often we're right.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
call times and script based call centers make it in to a procedure-oriented helpdesk and at that level you are better off people who are non tech and not as a staring place for techs.
att level 1 sucks they can't see that some back end setting is not right and just tell the reboot your system and you have to get past them to the next level so that guy can see that on the back end your move was not setup the right way in a back end system.
And I bet he is one of the ones that called into a help desk during the Blackberry outage while it was being broadcast all over the news and he likely heard a front end message on the help desk line about the outage then stayed on the line to get help because he couldn't get email on his Blackberry.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
I have rarely used a help desk. I spent much of my career in Asia and the former Soviet Union in the pre-Skype days. If I had a problem there was no one I could sensibly call and speak to in English. Mainly I have used help forums for the last 15 years. There is an etiquette to this, but the results are usually very satisfactory. Rarely do I even have to pose the question myself. A thoughtful search of a well-chosen forum often discloses a thread started by somebody with the same problem I had. In recent years a Google search often kicks off the investigation, but not always.
But once in a great while circumstances force me to call in. Usually it goes okay. But...My last experience with a help desk was an hour-long comic nightmare. My problem was that I had to call Verizon to get the passcode for their ISP as I had a non-Verizon router (Verizon branded routers have the ISP pass code built in, but I wanted to run Tomato firmware so I bought the Linksys. My instructions were to call in to Verizon to get my code. Easy peasy.)
My interlocutor was a patient and charming Phillipina working from a script in Manila. Somehow the convoluted script she used turned the original strong passcode into my permanent user name (she actually had my account open). Which, of course, becomes my Verizon email address. (Not that I would use it as I have my own anyway.) So find me now at something like aM1Xncg@verizon.com (Not the actual one since it is impossible to remember.) When I log on to their website (which is rarely) I have to use the ridiculous Mister Mxyzptlk username. It is immutable of course. Mine until I cancel my account or, perhaps, until I endure another phone call to Manila. Not. Worth. It. I would think that at JPL, or any other place that has a high proportion of scientists and engineers, you will find the in-house help desk used ... reluctantly.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Some pundits even argue that the Space Shuttle was only a wasteful form of space tourism. (I.e.: What is "payload specialist" and political science major Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud doing on the Space Shuttle?)
Now, after the Space Shuttle is history and one probe after another gets cancelled, it's not even space tourism anymore, it's purely PR.
THe issue you need is if your workstation isn't running.People can read things themselves and do a lot more than fixing a car as an analogy that someone put it.
Otherwise you need I.T. and not google an answer if the share with all the critical work files vanishes off their desktop or other work related issue that needs to get fixed ASAP so people can work.Obviously you can't give everyone administrative rights to play with sharepoint or a share on the network to troubleshoot it themselves.
http://saveie6.com/
English isn't your first language, is it?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Oh god no. Are you fsking insane? They did this at a place I was running support for. They bumped level 1 to level 2, terminated to the level 2 people, left us ground troops, and hired dips who read scripts. My workload went through the roof. No one in tier one did jack but make tickets, tier 2 just passed the buck to us, and most users after a few times just asked to be escalated to my group.
First order logic simplification for you.
You forgot to add some synergy and mix in some paradigms.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Which is helpful, when every one at work is a rocket scientist.
I can assure you after being not the help desk, that I now get the help desk requests for dealing with peoples mobile phones.
As a corporate user, I get someone in the UK to talk to for PC problems. They seem to know their stuff and generally seem quite happy to admit that I know mine. The quality of their English is about as good as you will get. They are in central Scotland which is much easier to understand than most of urban England. I know at least one of them has a degree because we compared university courses while we waited for a test to complete.
Once or twice, I have ended up on the Dell Home stuff. It got me through to India. They seemed to be very bound to their scripts and when I mentioned things that I had done that the script only mentioned further on, they asked me to do them when they got to that line - try a different lead / swop HDDs with a working PC / and so on. They are certainly doing better work in English than I could do in someone else's language but I find Glaswegians easier.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Seriously - if your help desk is so incompetent, antagonistic, and/or slow that they can get faster or more helpful answers from Google or a co-worker, it doesn't mean that your system isn't necessary - it means that the people you are hiring are no-fucking-good at their job. Time to turn your position over to someone who can run your department properly.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well what about the other side of where tech's in level 1 are stuck with call times and scripts.
So they can end up having to skip parts of the script fix the what is broken and get written up for not useing the script or they can eat up time going though the script even they know how to fix it so at the end of the script then they walk though the fixing part and then they get written up for have a long call time.
maybe have real techs at level 1.5 then with level 2 techs in place as well.
In Soviet Russia, Helpdesk make you disappear!
Come over to Russian block Mr. Soderstrom, I help your mobile device problems.
Tom's basically a technology gadfly. He evangelizes things that will get good publicity for JPL and influence NASA leadership's opinion of JPL as the leader in innovation among their contractors (JPLers are all Caltech employees unlike the NASA centers). The cloud vendors love him as well since he's willing to talk them up even though they have minimal business with JPL as measured in dollars (the publicity is priceless).
Tom is probably confused. JPL puts no secret or top secret data in the public cloud. They may put ITAR data there, but that's a different beast entirely with much lower barriers.
How clueless is this guy? Our helpdesk team takes calls every day to help someone with their mobile device. This guy acts like cell phones are getting less complicated.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Before you string me up from the nearest tree, this was taken completely out of context from a larger conversation and I was only talking about the help desk in the future (not tomorrow) and only in regards to mobile devices. Here’s the essence: Our help desk members are truly fantastic, have a broad range of expertise, work really hard, and do a great job! So how can we leverage that expertise more? The industry trends in our environment indicate a change in focus -- especially as the digital natives enter the workforce in larger numbers and demand a choice of mobile devices -- to where we will ask the help desk for advise not so much on how to use the variety of mobile devices but how to write applications for them or where to find/update this advice. The help desk personnel could help maintain this expertise, the organizations’ mobile apps, mobile best practices, etc. This won’t apply to all help desks or all environments, but I think it’s a worthy goal for the future with benefits for help desk employees, help desk users, and the organizations. I would welcome a discussion on IF and HOW we should prepare for this future.
Yeah right. I call BS on the TS. If you have even the vaugest idea on the security requirements for classified national security data and making it portable you would be rolling on the ground right.
Guy in charge of technology says by using even more complicated technology, they will have no need to support it. Sounds like to me, he is setting up to need a larger help desk actually. Now they support ALL mobile platforms.
I have a question. How did he get this job being so out of touch?
I used to wonder if this is the case but from what I've seen over the last 20 years of working in computer support in corporate environments with engineers and scientists is that the 'new generation' is every bit as lazy as before. Yes, they may have had more smarts out of the gates of uni with computers and smartphones but they quickly realise that they don't want to help themselves. Infact whilst many of them are adept at using the technology in comparison to the previous generation, they are in some ways more naive as well.
Its more like the head of a chain of aircraft engine shops saying no one needs to take their car to an outside specialist to have their engine rebuilt because everyone who works for him either can do it for themselves or can find someone in their circle of acquaintances who can.