Getting Philosophical About Supporting Users
By Brian Walsh
In the Middle Ages, monks sat around and debated topics like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and whether or not Adam had a navel. These may seem like ludicrous issues today, but for those who took religion seriously in the Middle Ages, no philosophical question was left unaddressed.
One of the perennial debates for network managers today is how much support staff is required to support a user. These present day techno-monks who pray at the altar of technology have replaced discussions on the nature of the divine with discussions on the salvation of the dollar.
 It seems to me that most of today's discussions about network expenses are
really about the labor costs associated with support. Support is one of those issues that doesn't ever seem to contribute to the bottom line. Instead, it finds a permanent home in t
he cost column. The sides of this debate are predictable--support equals overhead, and that takes away from the bottom line. On one hand, there's a desire for cost reduction. On the other, there's a need to respond to user requirements, such as growth, new platforms and applications, and the day-to-day churn of desktop troubleshooting.
The good news is that the market is finally reacting. Corporations have done a good job of translating financial pressures regarding staff levels and in turn, vendors are responding. The network computer (NC), plug and play and other desktop enhancements are all attempts to slow the need for expansion of support staff. Ultimately, the solution lies with IS management, not with vendors. There are two reasons for this: First, the problem usually is expressed in terms of labor costs. And second, no
network professional looks at his/her queue of tasks and thinks that he/she will ever be out of a job.
We can safely assume that by this time next year, technology will exist to make servers, desktops and network components easier to use. You also can bet that by this time next year you'll have more requirements that need to be filled at more sites that still need to be built. No company I know of has enough people and equipment on hand to satisfy all user requirements, so support staffs always find themselves more than fully utilized. Furthermore, as business needs become more demanding, support costs do not drop.
A Whole New Look
Why not view the problem this way: How can you best use the people you have now, as opposed to waiting and hoping that next year there will exist some new technology to solve all of your problems. The most common approach to proving you're doing the right thing by your users is to benchmark your staff against other companies.
The typical use of this technique is
for managers from a small shop to visit a larger shop and look for the material they need to justify expanding or cutting their number of support people. "If Company A can support 600 use
rs with only three support people, why does it take us 20?" Or, "If Company B can justify all those support folks, why can't I get management to approve additional staff?" Everyone wants a magic number--a benchmark that holds true in all cases. The search for the number of angels on the head of a pin is ... N! The search continues.
It should come as no surprise that there are no simple answers. We're really trying to judge the performance of a task, function or process--not just come up with a number. But it takes a little more organization than that. Any benchmarking experience in this area will be a lot more productive if you first answer a few questions about your network organization and then compare data with the organization you're visiting. That way you end up comparing apples to apples. If you benchmark your shop
to others, get your thinking out of head-count mode. It doesn't matter if you want to increase or decrease your head count; you won't get much out of the benchmark effort unless you concentrate on best practices. Raise the expectation from seeing what can be done for how little, to how it is done.
My first reaction is to rephrase "How can we reduce costs by eliminating staff?" to "How can we foster an ongoing process that eliminates obstacles to our production staff, and enables them to provide the organization with best-of-breed tools and systems?" What we hope to do is monitor the effectiveness of the support process and control costs, so that reducing the cost of production staff becomes a secondary issue.
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