Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms

Making Exceptions to IT Rules - Follow-up

Comments And Links On "Making Exceptions To IT Rules"

The great thing about writing a blog is the comments you receive and the discussion that ensues.  Often this is better than the original post.

Such is the case with my last post, Making Exceptions to IT Rules. So far I've received 3 comments and they are fantastic! Each one makes an excellent point(s) and is well worth going back and reading. They are so great that I wanted to highlight them and recommend that you read them.

In addition, Chris Peters provided some links to a new way of thinking about PC deployment that can help break the paradigm of a "standard" PC. Peter Thompson, provided a link to a video from TED of Barry Schwartz talking about "our loss of wisdom" which decrys the blind obedience to standards.

These comments are well worth going back to the post to read them.

Thanks to Doug Goldberg, Chris Peters and Peter Thompson.

Making Exceptions To IT Rules

Treating standards as absolutes can be counterproductive.

IT folks often see things as a choice of two absolutes. It suits our way of thinking. It may have started with the days of binary coding where everything was either a 1 or a 0 and only a 1 or a 0. We like the simplicity and elegance of only having a choice between 1 or 0, right or wrong, yes or no, black or white. This black or white perspective would be nice if it could truly be achieved, but the hard truth is that we live in a gray world where absolutes are rare.

So we write our policies and develop our standards. We make them iron clad and air tight. And then inevitably comes an exception. One of the vice presidents at your company wants a special cellphone or new style of laptop. Or perhaps it's an engineer wanting to purchase a new software package that IT hasn't approved.

After a lot back and forth, we may give in begrudgingly or hold fast and have a customer grumble about the poor customer service. Either way we do a slow burn and say to no one in particular, "Don't they know what we're trying to do? Don't they understand we have standards?" The simple answer is "No, they don't."

Avoiding The IT Death Spiral

Four Tips For Better IT Budgeting

Many pundits are indicating the economy has hit bottom and we are starting to come out of the recession. I don't know if this is true, but I certainly hope so. At the same time, no one seems to expect a rapid climb back, which means controlling costs will remain an important factor in our operations.

As you prepare your budgets for next year, you'll no doubt go through many iterations. You may start out with plans for new systems only to be told to come back with a budget that stays flat. Top management doesn't like what it's getting for their money--or believes it is out of sync with what the company is trying to do. Or management may simply not understand IT, and so demand you lower your costs. To appease top management, you produce a number of different plans that include more and more cost reductions.

Budgeting this way, however, can easily lead to a classic death spiral. We dutifully reduce our costs by cutting services where we think prudent; this leads to more dissatisfaction and more demands for reduced costs--and so on and so on, until the cost that is ultimately reduced is you.

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid this.

A Better Helpdesk

Emphasize the customer's needs--not IT's--when you design technical support systems.

I've always believed that the quality of helpdesks and support technicians are the most important factors in shaping user perceptions of IT. Not the big application that you just rolled out saving the company big bucks, not the amount of money you've saved by consolidating your data centers and certainly not all of your promises of new systems and hardware yet to come.

Your helpdesk and support technicians truly are your Directors of First Impression by which people judge your entire organization. If you can't fix my PC quickly or are rude and provide no status information on my problem, why should I think you can deliver on the expensive new application project?

And yet so often we set up our helpdesk and support technicians for failure. As Jessica Rabbit said, "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." Likewise, our helpdesk and support technicians are not incompetent or uncaring, but the process we so often make them work with just makes them appear that way.

Good Customer Service / Help Desk Operations

Yahoo! Small Business Demonstrates Help Desk Customer Service Can Be Done Well

Many bloggers, myself included, write about the various happenings in their life and use these events to demonstrate a point. In many cases the happenings are used as a bad example.  This time instead I have a good example of customer service. The unique thing about the example of good customer service is its rarity.

I use Yahoo! Small Business for my email and domain (mwschaffner.com) hosting and have been very pleased with it.  I've been using the older, i.e. classic, email version and until recently it worked fine.  A few weeks ago I started having problems switching between my yahoo.com account and my mwschaffner.com account.  When I would click on the link for mwschaffner.com I would get a Page Not Found error.

A True Error, Not a Glitch

Baytown Mayor Admits Error In Release Of Banking Info

I've written recently about The Real Problem With Computer Glitches.  Computer glitches are when something goes wrong but we don't talk abut someone making a mistake or a bad process being used.  Something just happened without human intervention (yeh, right).  I followed that up with a comment an Another Glitch regarding Goveronor Scharzenegger and a computer glitch that kept a law student from taking the bar exam.

Although I don't want to beat this subject to death I just have to comment about an article I saw in today's Houston Chronicle, Baytown releases banking info for 10,000 by mistake.  It seems that some how banking information about 10,000 people that paid tickets after being caught by a red light camera.  What was interesting was how this was portrayed. 

Another Glitch

Schwarzenegger: Overlook glitch, let paralyzed grad take bar exam

My last post, The Real Problem With Computer Glitches, dealt with the mis-direction calling failures merely "glitches" causes.  This morning I ran across a story on CNN, Schwarzenegger: Overlook glitch, let paralyzed grad take bar exam.  It seems that a glitch or technical error was keeping law student, Sara Granda, from taking the bar exam because she paid for the test with a check instead of the usual method of using a credit card.  Fortunately, it appears that Schwarzenegger is coming to the rescue.

As heart-warming as the story is, it is missing a couple of key elements. First, what really caused the problem, and second, what is being done to prevent it from happening again.

The Real Problem With Computer Glitches

Calling system failures ''glitches'' only masks the problem.

Visa prepaid debit cards recently suffered a rather public and embarrassing problem. It seems that a "small" number of users made normal purchases only to be charged $23,148,855,308,184,500-- basically, $23 quadrillion and change. Visa later indicated that fewer than 13,000 transactions were affected. The credit card company subsequently removed the charges and magnanimously waived the overdraft fee.

This was, as is quite common in these situations, described as a computer glitch. But the term "computer glitch" really frustrates me. People have been conditioned to think of a computer glitch as something that just happens when the computer goes haywire and that there is nothing that can be done to prevent it. 

What IT Needs To Give Up

The best IT governance in tough times involves giving up some control--and a lot of information

Balancing requests for more services has always been a challenge but it is especially tough during tough economic times when adding more resource is no longer an option. It is in situations like this when the word "no" can be very powerful.

This may seem contradictory to my previous suggestions that IT should put more effort into saying yes but it really isn't.  The concept of saying yes is about finding ways to help rather than looking for reasons why you can't help, why something can't be done or why something won't work. I still think we should look for ways to say yes in that context.

Identity Protection Goes Beyond Technology

We need to include the "human element" in our identity protection schemes

Identity theft and security is always in the spotlight through the constant stream of news stories about companies losing confidential customer or client data, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, health histories and so forth. These "breaking news" stories now seem to happen so frequently that we scarcely pay attention to them unless, of course, we are directly impacted by them. They have, however, heightened the public awareness and have even spawned new identity protection businesses.

IT companies rightly react to this by developing new technologies to improve security and eagerly market these to CIOs as a way to protect the personal information of their customers and clients. While we should use these appropriately we can't rely just on technology for identity protection.