I applaud thee, for hitting the nail head on. But let us not forget that this is our own fault, for thinking we were untouchable in our ivory tower of arcane knowledge. We should've seen the signs as IT matured and learned how to crunch the numbers like a controller do, and market this to the policymakers. It was fun while it lasted, but now it is all business I'm afraid.
Unless you have management with you on where you are right now, and what is required to get where _they_ want to go, you're not doing a good job. No matter how technical superb your solutions may be then, they'll still just be your solutions and not the companies. If you have an understand, there will be resources (or at least support for making the right priorities).
Especially because I, just like Hellesö, is a Norwegian photographer living in this part of Sweden (northern Småland). When I saw his book Året (http://www.fotosidan.se/shop/viewproduct.htm?ID=17869) where he took one great shot every day of a full year I was flabbergasted and couldn't believe it was possible. Obviously it wasn't. Everybody manipulates photos, just by adjusting the ISO you're manipulating, but he stole stock photos, passing them off as his own. And yet, I accept his apology as heartfelt, and just wish he had redefined his works instead of passing them off as "real". If you're interested in nature photography, do check out his portfolio still. His style, where presence takes precedence over clarity is novel and refreshing.
...and consider the opportunities. If, by some unprecedented fluke, the automanufacturers agree on an open standard for V2V communication and radar becomes standard in cars. What then? Augmented reality where cars are bracketed on your windscreen? The option to toss a "thank you" at someone who let you into their lane? Your driverslicence keep a record of these messages from fellow drivers, where your drivingexperience and behaviour is indicated in their windshield brackets? I smell an interesting new future where intercar communication goes beyond flashing headlights and honking horns.
I particularly like that they hyperlinked the split articles for ease of reading. Remember when magazines used to have a "(Continued on page 80)" at the end? Well, they've thought of that, and kudos for the extra effort!
I can't say whether planes would actually fall out of the sky, but I did have to patch communication equipment used to synch flightdata between national flight control and abroad. If not, they wouldn't know what those blips on their radars were, when they were supposed to arrive etc. I'd call that a rather paramount issue. OTOH, the only post Y2K incident I had to clean up was a server spewing out invoices dated 1980... in September 2001 (NW server rebooted due to a powerfailure). I think it's fair to say we did a good job.
Establish protocols and make the processes transparent.
Users in general have no idea about technology and don't care. This is fine. That's your job to know, after all. But when their ignorance include how internal IT handles their tickets you have a huge problem. To solve this, you must have management on your side. If you fail at this you should look for something else (start you own business and sell your services back at a premium rate perhaps?).
Management should know their IT-investments and importance of the systems involved like the back of their hand. If they treat IT like a magic moneydrain you need a consultant to teach them another perspective. Organize the services provided by IT, delegate responsibilities accordingly, prioritize the said services, document the processes, and market the whole bundle internally. Use ITIL or COBIT or whatever suits your organization and pleases the top brass. But make it obvious to the users how things work and what can be expected!
Have management sign SLAs saying stuff like it's ok to expect a new user account in 3 days, priority printers fixed within 4 hours etc. Yes, it's a lot of paper, and no, you can't do this alone. But if they really care about their business they will do this to translate what IT do into money, which, in any commercial business is vital. With that backing users will still behave like pricks and try to sidewind the system, but you have your back covered.
Turning bitter and disillusioned takes about a year or two in IT support. After 3-4 years you will likely be permanently scarred unless the fundamentals are solid, so take control now or perish. Asking here is a good start, but at heart this isn't a personal issue, it's a management problem.
Believe me, it's the only sane road. Take it from someone who started out enthusiastic and eager to help, turned bitter and BOFH and later burned out.
OMG, Derek Smart! I had completely forgotten about Battlecruiser 3000AD until I saw this post. For entertainment I used to follow a newsgroup back then where the flames went higher than anywhere else I've seen. It didn't take more than a flametroll the size of a match to set off an entire forest of replies, and they never seemed to die. Some acid remark was dropped, immediately attacked by loyal fans, who in return was attacked by more angry customers and in the middle Derek Smart in person trying to defend himself by throwing more fuel to fire. He's a Don Quixote legend in my eyes, never mind his programming. If anything, the whole circus around BC3000 taught me to temper my postings, thus making the world an infititesmally better place.
I've been working in support for five years. Primarily lastline support. At lastline support you don't have to deal with neophytes, mainly we support techies at IT-departments who just doesn't have time to read thru SCSI-logs or dig into timeconsuming troubleshooting. They pay well for us to fix their errors, because it's good to have someone who cuts thru the BS fingerpointing between HW, SW and database suppliers. Of course, this means we're the ones who have to contact their suppliers, often for the nth time.
Doing this for so long have learned me how to handle the idiot-filters at the software companies helpdesks to get to talk to an informed techie. But sometimes, you just can't win'em.
At this one problem, I needed some obscure fact about a backupsoftwares API-agent for a databasebackup. I called the regional supportcentre and explained the problem in detail, mailed the logs, and was told that this was too heavy for them. So I was given a 'special number' directly to the german techs who supposedly made this piece of code. 'Great!' I thought, finally someone who knows what I'm talking about.
I dialled the number and was greeted by a fellow with an thick, german accent, who said he couldn't hear me properly. I spoke with a clear diction, and talked louder and louder until I was almost shouting in my cubicle. Heads were popping up around me, and I was standing there, shouting at him to be heard. I too, could hear the crackling of the poor connection - only, it didn't really sound like a poor connection. It sounded more like some moron crumbling paper near the reciever. At this point I also heard a distinct giggle from the background. The techsupport still insisted it was a bad line, so I hung up, and dialled the number again. This time a woman answered, apparently their supervisor. She excused my previous treatment (not very sincere, as I could hear from her voice she had just been laughing hard) and she explained that the students they had answering the support hotline were 'a bit rowdy'. I'd say! But did I get mad? Not at all, in fact it was a rather amusing anecdote to be passed on around at lunch. You see, working with id10ts for five years has taught me such selfcontrol, it would make a samurai selfcombust in envy.
End of story was that they needed to make yet another patch for their buggy agent, so I just told the customer to make a query to put their databases available for offline backup.
Hey, I'm a geek, and I still read Wired. That's where I initially saw the story. Not often on, though. It's a lot of years gone by since the 'information wants to be free' and 'zippies' attitude of the ninieties (before they sold out). And where did my guru go? The guy with the greek name, dang, can't remember what it was...
Oh, a quick search on Amazon and I get:
being digital : Nicholas Negroponte. He was way out there. Fun to read, though.
..if these companies are remotely serious about business. but they're not. as stated in the article - prosecuting frauds are hard to do. even though they figure they guy behind it all is a reformed neo-nazi (jewish mother, was it?), they guy to fall is a 19 yr old chess wizard who think he's smart. and how many of them aren't there out there? companies like that set up shop in a day, and I expect, close faster. no, I think the right approach should be to secure your servers (no relay, spamfilter), and seek out the evildoers with a cluebat.
Slashdot Mirror
I applaud thee, for hitting the nail head on.
But let us not forget that this is our own fault, for thinking we were untouchable in our ivory tower of arcane knowledge. We should've seen the signs as IT matured and learned how to crunch the numbers like a controller do, and market this to the policymakers.
It was fun while it lasted, but now it is all business I'm afraid.
This ^
Unless you have management with you on where you are right now, and what is required to get where _they_ want to go, you're not doing a good job. No matter how technical superb your solutions may be then, they'll still just be your solutions and not the companies. If you have an understand, there will be resources (or at least support for making the right priorities).
Especially because I, just like Hellesö, is a Norwegian photographer living in this part of Sweden (northern Småland). When I saw his book Året (http://www.fotosidan.se/shop/viewproduct.htm?ID=17869) where he took one great shot every day of a full year I was flabbergasted and couldn't believe it was possible. Obviously it wasn't. Everybody manipulates photos, just by adjusting the ISO you're manipulating, but he stole stock photos, passing them off as his own. And yet, I accept his apology as heartfelt, and just wish he had redefined his works instead of passing them off as "real". If you're interested in nature photography, do check out his portfolio still. His style, where presence takes precedence over clarity is novel and refreshing.
...and consider the opportunities. If, by some unprecedented fluke, the automanufacturers agree on an open standard for V2V communication and radar becomes standard in cars. What then? Augmented reality where cars are bracketed on your windscreen? The option to toss a "thank you" at someone who let you into their lane? Your driverslicence keep a record of these messages from fellow drivers, where your drivingexperience and behaviour is indicated in their windshield brackets? I smell an interesting new future where intercar communication goes beyond flashing headlights and honking horns.
Not all. Some play that tradeoff game until consumers protest enough. In heaven.... http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/stolen-pixels/8286-Stolen-Pixels-241-The-Gaming-Afterlife
I particularly like that they hyperlinked the split articles for ease of reading. Remember when magazines used to have a "(Continued on page 80)" at the end? Well, they've thought of that, and kudos for the extra effort!
I can't say whether planes would actually fall out of the sky, but I did have to patch communication equipment used to synch flightdata between national flight control and abroad. If not, they wouldn't know what those blips on their radars were, when they were supposed to arrive etc. I'd call that a rather paramount issue. OTOH, the only post Y2K incident I had to clean up was a server spewing out invoices dated 1980... in September 2001 (NW server rebooted due to a powerfailure). I think it's fair to say we did a good job.
Establish protocols and make the processes transparent.
Users in general have no idea about technology and don't care. This is fine. That's your job to know, after all. But when their ignorance include how internal IT handles their tickets you have a huge problem. To solve this, you must have management on your side. If you fail at this you should look for something else (start you own business and sell your services back at a premium rate perhaps?).
Management should know their IT-investments and importance of the systems involved like the back of their hand. If they treat IT like a magic moneydrain you need a consultant to teach them another perspective. Organize the services provided by IT, delegate responsibilities accordingly, prioritize the said services, document the processes, and market the whole bundle internally. Use ITIL or COBIT or whatever suits your organization and pleases the top brass. But make it obvious to the users how things work and what can be expected!
Have management sign SLAs saying stuff like it's ok to expect a new user account in 3 days, priority printers fixed within 4 hours etc. Yes, it's a lot of paper, and no, you can't do this alone. But if they really care about their business they will do this to translate what IT do into money, which, in any commercial business is vital. With that backing users will still behave like pricks and try to sidewind the system, but you have your back covered.
Turning bitter and disillusioned takes about a year or two in IT support. After 3-4 years you will likely be permanently scarred unless the fundamentals are solid, so take control now or perish. Asking here is a good start, but at heart this isn't a personal issue, it's a management problem.
Believe me, it's the only sane road. Take it from someone who started out enthusiastic and eager to help, turned bitter and BOFH and later burned out.
Good luck, you've got a long road ahead of you.
OMG, Derek Smart! I had completely forgotten about Battlecruiser 3000AD until I saw this post. For entertainment I used to follow a newsgroup back then where the flames went higher than anywhere else I've seen. It didn't take more than a flametroll the size of a match to set off an entire forest of replies, and they never seemed to die. Some acid remark was dropped, immediately attacked by loyal fans, who in return was attacked by more angry customers and in the middle Derek Smart in person trying to defend himself by throwing more fuel to fire. He's a Don Quixote legend in my eyes, never mind his programming. If anything, the whole circus around BC3000 taught me to temper my postings, thus making the world an infititesmally better place.
I've been working in support for five years. Primarily lastline support. At lastline support you don't have to deal with neophytes, mainly we support techies at IT-departments who just doesn't have time to read thru SCSI-logs or dig into timeconsuming troubleshooting. They pay well for us to fix their errors, because it's good to have someone who cuts thru the BS fingerpointing between HW, SW and database suppliers. Of course, this means we're the ones who have to contact their suppliers, often for the nth time.
Doing this for so long have learned me how to handle the idiot-filters at the software companies helpdesks to get to talk to an informed techie. But sometimes, you just can't win'em.
At this one problem, I needed some obscure fact about a backupsoftwares API-agent for a databasebackup. I called the regional supportcentre and explained the problem in detail, mailed the logs, and was told that this was too heavy for them. So I was given a 'special number' directly to the german techs who supposedly made this piece of code. 'Great!' I thought, finally someone who knows what I'm talking about.
I dialled the number and was greeted by a fellow with an thick, german accent, who said he couldn't hear me properly. I spoke with a clear diction, and talked louder and louder until I was almost shouting in my cubicle. Heads were popping up around me, and I was standing there, shouting at him to be heard. I too, could hear the crackling of the poor connection - only, it didn't really sound like a poor connection. It sounded more like some moron crumbling paper near the reciever. At this point I also heard a distinct giggle from the background. The techsupport still insisted it was a bad line, so I hung up, and dialled the number again.
This time a woman answered, apparently their supervisor. She excused my previous treatment (not very sincere, as I could hear from her voice she had just been laughing hard) and she explained that the students they had answering the support hotline were 'a bit rowdy'. I'd say! But did I get mad? Not at all, in fact it was a rather amusing anecdote to be passed on around at lunch. You see, working with id10ts for five years has taught me such selfcontrol, it would make a samurai selfcombust in envy.
End of story was that they needed to make yet another patch for their buggy agent, so I just told the customer to make a query to put their databases available for offline backup.
Hey, I'm a geek, and I still read Wired. That's where I initially saw the story. Not often on, though. It's a lot of years gone by since the 'information wants to be free' and 'zippies' attitude of the ninieties (before they sold out). And where did my guru go? The guy with the greek name, dang, can't remember what it was... Oh, a quick search on Amazon and I get: being digital : Nicholas Negroponte. He was way out there. Fun to read, though.
..if these companies are remotely serious about business. but they're not. as stated in the article - prosecuting frauds are hard to do. even though they figure they guy behind it all is a reformed neo-nazi (jewish mother, was it?), they guy to fall is a 19 yr old chess wizard who think he's smart. and how many of them aren't there out there?
companies like that set up shop in a day, and I expect, close faster.
no, I think the right approach should be to secure your servers (no relay, spamfilter), and seek out the evildoers with a cluebat.