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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.'"
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.
We are actively discouraged from using them, so naturally other resources will be sought, and found.
This is the new paradigm. First you provide something useful, then you make it suck, then you say 'well, no-one is using this anymore, so we'll scrap it'.
Maybe that works for JPL staff. But the staff I support never research a problem themselves. They either call the Help Desk at the first sign of trouble without trying even basic troubleshooting (e.g. turn it off and back on again), or they sit and endure the problem for days or maybe even weeks, and then call the Help Desk.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
In many cases, IT is not allowed to give you the permissions to fix the problem due to regulatory requirements. Developers in particular may have access to sensitive data so their machines have to be locked down, with associated documentation and logging to show that they meet corporate build standards.
In our organization, we give local admin to most people that ask for it -- I've found that about half of the people that think they know how to take care of problems on their own, actually know just enough to get themselves into more trouble.
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.
"Bing it" Nobody bings... please let me conduct my experiment, if you "BING" more that twice a day, reply to this message.
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.
So... since you work at a help desk, you're basing this off of the fact that nobody calls you saying "Hey, just wanted to let you know I had this problem but I found the answer on Google!" ?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
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.
> Natural progression. I worked at a first-world call center for a while and found that if you do anything but read the book word-for-word you'd get punished.
That's actually true. A friend of mine was fired for suggesting a solution to a user that actually worked, because he could see from the script that he was going to be required to give the user the wrong answer. Despite leaving a satisfied customer, he was written up for going off-script and terminated.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> 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.
Or... follow me on this... put together a knowledge base of common break/fix issues, and point people to that instead. Providing end-users with a well-defined set of Officially Approved Answers much safer and more reliable than ever ever sending them to Google, etc.