I do! On my CPU, no less.
Oh, you know, to extend the ah, markup on… look, I don’t have time for this!
Most contracts will have defined SLAs if they are not meeting them you should hold them to the fire but also realize that most help desk requests that come as “emergencies.” With an outsourced provider it is more difficult but as an internal department we try to judge the actual cost to the company. Lost worker hours are at a lower priority than the primadonna marketing VP’s cat’s iPad which has a lower priority than issues that directly impact revenue or are customer facing.
It doesn’t help that first line help desk positions tend to be entry level and these individuals don’t have the chutzpah to say no or set realistic expectations. They are looking to impress and don’t understand how bad it is to not set realistic expectations.
Part of this is also one of the cost of outsourcing. The loyalty of the help-desk is not to your company but to the metrics they have to make for their managers happy.
Often those metrics may not align with your desires but without looking at your contracts SLAs it is hard to guess if they are standing up to their agreement.
We outsource some services in some areas but we keep metrics and if they are not hitting the SLAs we demand remediation.
By doing so we make sure they are adhering to our contract and that the contract is the help desk workers manager’s priority, thus it is the help desk’s priority.
If not they will oversubscribe their workers as much as you the customer will tolerate.
So somebody will use a web service to manually extract data, paste it in to a Word document, and FTP the doc to a file server.
Your application will then download the document (how? Polling the FTP account every n seconds or something?), strip away all of the Word stuff, and then Do Stuff with it?
Man… that’s an “interesting” system design right there.
I think I may know. They are viewing FTP as a way to move files between systems, and then want to delete files older than 90 days because you should have copied those files someplace else for permanent storage. I think what the OP needs to do is contact IT, tell them what they want to do, and then figure out a solution. Using DropBox might be the best solution, you can just ignore IT entirely.
And the SLAs may be badly written or deliberately misinterpreted. The company I work for outsources it’s IT support to [big company you have heard of, who ought to know better]. For the entire duration of one contract, they gleefully hid behind the fact that the time requirements for resolving tickets referenced closing tickets, rather than solving tickets. Therefore, the denizens of the desk were dinged for tickets that stayed open, but not for tickets that were closed without being resolved. If you filed a ticket for a problem that took more than a day to fix, they would fiddle with it for a few hours, then close it without notice. When you complained, they’d tell you to open another ticket.
That loophole got closed when contract renewal time came around, apparently. Now they’re required to confirm that they can mark the ticket as “resolved”. Their process for this is to send an email at a time when they know our office is closed, stating their intent to close the ticket, and asking us to reply within an hour if the problem isn’t fixed. Silence means assent, you know.
Yeah, most of us don’t bother to contact them at all. We’re all techies in my department, so we just fix things ourselves, find workarounds, or do without. We’re hoping their contract won’t be renewed this year; the guy who has been championing them at HQ is apparently gone, so the fix is no longer in, and we’ve got a large pilot program to replace our laptops and OS with stuff they don’t support.
This is potentially career shorting advice if the data is subject to hipaa.
Yeah…I did mean DYMO. It was a very nice desktop printer that looked very cool on my desk. TRIM is a records management system that was bought by several companies and now belongs to HP. Of course, nobody in HP knows the system, so while their customer support people are very nice, they know nothing about it.
Anyhow, you can close the ticket because I’m the super-user. I’m the one who tells the nice HP tech support people how it works. We no longer pay the $2,500 yearly support fee for the program because they not only cannot fix my problems, they don’t know enough about the program to understand the problem.
Yeah, elegant, huh? This has FAIL written all over it.
Maybe you’re just not cut out to work for Rube Goldberg Technologies.
I thought it was pretty clear that the original request was “Can we have a place where we can all store files to for other people to access”.
Ah, well, there’s your mistake.
That’s why we call ours the ‘Helpless Desk’. Seems their solution to any problem is ‘format and reinstall’. They used to have some competent people over there until the ‘reorganization’.
Ah, yeah, I remember when my brother’s battalion hired an IT company to upgrade their computers from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 (hey, it’s been a few years). They did it by reformatting all the hard drives and installing an image. What, you wanted your old files? You should have mentioned that.
We actually have pretty good IT support here, maybe because one of the guys is really sharp and responsive. Most of the stuff we need can get done with a quick e-mail.
Which is why I was recently reduced to scratching my head over an access decision. I’ve recently moved to a new physical location in the agency and taken on a role in which I no longer handle certain sensitive data.
A day or so after the move, my folder disappeared off the shared drive.
I’ve been here a long time, pinch-hitting in a variety of roles, and I have a LOT of different sorts of data stored in my folder, hierarchically organized into clearly labeled folders. Group A, Group B, and so on, with subfolders like /TPS reports and /Weekly Report Drafts and so on. I try to keep structure parallel, so there are /Group A /TPS Reports and /Group B /TPS Reports on the equivalent tiers.
I have tried to label things in plain English so that anyone can figure out what’s what, although I’m sure some personal quirks might be visible to someone with fresh eyes.
So, I called to ask what’s up with my root folder disappearing. I am told that it still exists, but that in order to protect the possibly sensitive data in one subfolder (data that I no longer really need to use in my new role), the entire structure was set to be seen only by administrators, not users, until I can clean out Subfolder X.
Well, I can’t clean it out, I can’t even see it, I reply. And I might be asked to pinch-hit in my old role again, and need the folder anyway. (That happened within the week, by the way).
OK, I am told, IT can set individual permissions, so that only I (and administrators) could see Subfolder X, but the problem is other people in my group might need access to the other subfolders under my name.
Well, can’t IT just set individual permissions for the small number of people in my group so that only I (and administrators) could see Subfolder X, and leave the other subfolders available to my group? And not just make everything disappear?
After a few seconds of silence: Yeah, we could do that.
It’s not an official Rube Goldberg technology unless it involves a candle burning through a string.
We’re setting up a conference call so we can sort all of this out.
Try doing it by having each person to join in conference in the next person on their phone instead of using a common number.
I’m starting to feel a great degree of sympathy for his IT helpdesk.
Trust me, in IT terms, you’re way past the burning through string stage.
God, I love my IT support. The process usually goes something like this:
- Vaguely think to myself “Hey, self, it would be awesome if this IT problem were solved”.
- Run into one of the IT guys in the hallway as they’re finishing up someone else’s problem, ask them to come over.
- Explain problem to them, they usually fix it on the spot. If not, they set up a specific appointment to fix it.
- They explain that they needed one of these “ticket” things to justify the work they’ve already finished, do I mind if they set up a ticket retroactively?
- I get some kind of email within a few hours explaining what was wrong, what was done about it, what the ticket number was, and how to escalate if I’m not happy.
It’s AMAZING.
ETA: And this is a government agency, where everyone is supposed to be inefficient and unhelpful. No one at my workplace got that memo.