Isn't it time we left everyone else alone...

....and started automating our industry?

As time has passed by I have become to lament our industry's inability to automate itself. There we are walking the corridors of our businesses telling them that our technologies can remove the drudgery from everyday working life.

When we get back to the office our next worry is, taking into consideration the skills shortage, how we're going to fill those 5 vacancies for help desk staff who spend all day re-setting passwords and unlocking domain accounts - there seems a certain irony to this picture that few of us have noticed.

To solve this we outsource the help desk - but all that does is move those staff off our site and the need to worry.

What we never consider is how can we make our computer systems self managing and allow our users to manage their own computing resources. "Can't trust them to do that" can we?

Well I think we can! I was involved in a project a few years ago that planned to do just that. The rules were very simple:

• Provide automated systems that would remove the need for users to "call the help desk"
• Ensure that web, email and chat communication was dealt with faster than telephone calls
• Turn the support teams on their heads and make sure first line contact staff were knowledgeable and able to deal or redirect calls effectively - the upshot of that was to get rid of level 1 - do we really still need call loggers?
• Simplify the help desk systems and publish them to the users using their language not the language of IT (or ITIL!)
• Ensure all actions by support staff are fully transparent to users - keep them involved!
• Provide a  service that could be published to users around the world via either web or email - wherever they were.

I wonder how many companies in the world have really thought about how they deliver service to their users in a way that engages them rather than alienates them.

One product we did use was from the very clever fingers of Shaun Blackmore who has left New Zealand and started to push Activate up a very big hill in America - a brave man with a fabulous vision. Good on ya mate!

The interesting thing I saw was that the primary nay sayers in this project were the IT managers who gradually began to realise that they were loosing their "power" in the organisation. Doesn't that sound just like those hand weavers when the spinning jenny's were being assembled?

I've always thought there are two reasons people don't ring help desks:

1. Everything is working
2. Everything is broken but - "There is no point because nothing happens when I ring anyway!"

Maybe automation might allow us to move our users from category 2 to 1?