It seems that I’ve hit a line of thought on the IT-ID-IT interface these days, so here is another in the series.
I knew that coming into my position in Science, that I’d be looking into a big morass of cultures, silos and the like. Part of this “darkness” would be how the individual IT units provide support and what their attitude toward the human users of their services are. I found that some departments offer full on desktop support, including applications, others have support only for the network while others have some mix with some apps supported, but not all. So what does this have to do with being able to help instructors?
If you feed your IT unit with enough support to support all the way to the core surf and turf applications, then the instructors have a feeling of safety. They know that they can be working on something and then if the program that they are using goes to the turf, that there is a quick call that will fix it. Without this, instructors are hesitant to try things that they know that they cannot back out of on their own. With this support, instructors focus on what they know they can do – deal with content. Across a group of instructors, this means that as a group, they are more willing to help each other out with integrating technology, because they don’t have to deal with their individual fears of a desktop app cratering. My guess as to why technology integration is so slow at any level is that this fear of the most basic “thing” going wrong is projected so strongly by some, that it takes quite a bit of handholding to undo it. Even if the one who is fearful is actually a competent user, they may be worried about something as simple as logins confusing new users.
This is a rehash of my “comfortable computing” idea, but I am surprised at how many times and in how many areas I see that it comes up. Some admin might take a look at what I’m saying and say that “I pay my IT people to keep email and web services running, not to help with PowerPoint”. If this is the case, then you need to get a desktop support person. If there isn’t the money, then you need to tell your IT people, that your main job is not to stare at green and orange LEDs all day, it is to ensure that the users are able to do their jobs, regardless of if their questions have anything to do with the LEDS in the head end. So what happens if the problem on the desktop doesn’t have an LED warning of imminent doom somewhere? Well in that instance, you’ve made your IT more human (just think of all the stereotypes of the IT people that are never around or approachable), so that when there is an LED problem, they are likely to hear about it from a friend rather than a “user” and that kind of environment can only help everyone.
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