The IT services department happens to be located in one of the factories,
because there was space there after the corporate administrative from all the
factories was centralized. The factories are all over the country. Centralization
of non-specialized work made sense, to reduce the overhead costs of
administrative staff. Of course, all these administrators were the ones who
produced the corporate management information, so the centralization became
part of a larger project to house all the executives in one place. The executives
needed good rail and highway links to the capital, good local hotels for visiting
clients and so on. So the new executive block was built in the nearest major city,
which happened to be some fifteen miles from the IT services department.
Two things raised the IT services manager’s suspicions. The first was the nature
of enquiries coming from the executive block. They indicated a level of IT
competence much lower than anywhere else in the corporation. That was no
surprise – the executives were notorious for never attending IT training courses
and their secretaries were known for booking on the courses but cancelling at
the last minute, usually blaming some unforeseen, high-level corporate
emergency.
The second factor was the quantity of calls coming from head office. Given the
number of users there, many more enquiries would have been expected. Given
the level of competence, it should have been higher still. Where were these calls
going? The answer was astonishing.
It is quite commonplace in large corporations for groups of users distant from the
IT services group to establish an unofficial local IT support person (often without
telling IT of this person’s existence, which plays the devil with calculating support
costs, but that’s another story). In the case of the executive block, this role had
by default fallen to the assistant marketing director. Not the assistant-to, but the
actual assistant director, a man whose salary was three times that of a desktop
support technician, yet that was the job he found himself doing half of his
working day.
And then there was the attitude of some, indeed too many of the users in that
building. They hated the fact that they had to queue to make an enquiry to the
helpdesk – even though the average call pickup time was less than thirty-eight
seconds. So rather than risk the queue, users with technical enquiries would
spend much longer periods of time touring the building looking for another user
who might know the answer to their question.
The waste was tremendous. Users interrupting other users, causing lost
productivity. Highly paid staff surrogating lowly paid work. All this fuelling an
unnecessary poor image of the IT services department.
Things only changed when the new IT director took hold of the situation. In
various presentations, regardless of the risk to his political popularity, he forced
the head office users at the highest level to acknowledge their behaviour and its