For many years, the IT industry has used the threat of going out of business as a way of compelling businesses to invest in backup and Disaster Recovery solutions. Essentially, there has been more than a little scaremongering about the risk of failing to back up data properly and putting appropriate plans in place for disaster recovery.
The cloud is perhaps the fastest growing technology trend of the last decade. When the world was dealing with the aftermath of the credit crunch and reeling with the blows from The Great Recession, businesses still needed the latest technology tools to ensure they could be competitive.
Many firms experience a pre-Christmas rush of finishing off work and projects in early and mid-December. For items in the workflow that are on-going, there is often a sense of ‘parking’ them over the Christmas - New Year transition period until the return to work in January. Many businesses are likely to have reduced workload and staffing numbers.
If we apply maturity modelling to the IT Support function, we are able to produce an effective mapping that overlays the five levels of a traditional maturity model with five different service levels of support.
In conventional patterns of thinking about jobs within businesses of 10 - 100 people, the role of IT manager is seen as the go-to person for anything related to technology.
Across an infrastructure demanding provision of business technology tools to a workforce of varying degrees of technological competence, this might include anything from a broken mouse to troubleshooting software server problems.
Whatever the core business activity of a firm, fast growth is a nice problem to have. Although the doomsayers warn of the problems of rapid uncontrolled growth, such as resourcing gaps and overstretching with too many commitments, these are challenges that should be well within the capability of a company governed with good management practice.
In many firms, IT is a tricky area. It’s complex, costly and impossible to ignore. It needs continual vigilance and good oversight to make sure it functions well. One of the biggest headaches is support.
We’ve all been there, particularly when dealing with personal consumer affairs. We are unhappy with the service we receive from a great big company that we deal with, like a telecoms provider, an energy supplier or an e-commerce giant. We try to get the company to rectify the situation, we may often find that we are still not satisfied that the outcome is fair.
Today, boxing is a questionable sport. To many, the risk of serious injury and death to its participants simply makes it unacceptable. To some, it seems anachronistic and it does perhaps belong to a different time because it harks back to the gladiatorial spectacles of an older human civilisation.
That’s a slightly provocative title for this blog. After all, there are two elements here. ‘IT’ refers to the technical bit, the ‘hard’ skills, while ‘Support’ speaks to the ‘soft’ skills of dealing with people, the context of any problem and managing it through to resolution.
For any given problem to be resolved within an acceptable time-frame requires the support person to be able to deliver on both counts equally well.
So why do we make the assertion that there is a greater emphasis on Support skills rather than IT skills?