Fri 06 Jun 2008 20:42
IT Support and human nature
IT is not about computers, but about people. This may be surprising: after
all, when we think about technology, we generally think about equipment,
gear, gadgets, code. But this gear doesn't exist for itself alone.
Quite frankly, an unused computer is nothing more than a combination of
space-heater and white noise generator. The I in IT is information,
and that information is generated by, used by, and valued by people.
For IT to be effective, it needs to be used effectively. Technology is
a tool: powerful and complex, and like all powerful and complex tools,
it takes time, effort and a certain amount of talent to learn to use the
tool effectively. People are social beings, and so we learn to use tools
in a social context: people who "know how" teach and help those who don't.
This, broadly speaking, is the logic of IT support, which, ultimately,
is a social construct to ensure that those who know how to use IT tools
are available to help those who need help to effectively use them.
Human beings live in the tension between the collective and the individual. This is a fancy way of saying that people live by interacting with other people in ways that range from the genuinely interpersonal to impersonal embodiments of complex social constructions. Consider the difference between "I love you" on one extreme and "One Way, Do Not Enter" on the other. Both the collective and the interpersonal elements of human interaction are present in IT support: the nature of the technology imposes the need to interact with complex technical systems, while the nature of the human beings who use the technology requires one-on-one personal interaction. Indeed, IT support fails when it becomes too much like the notion of a "computer centre", too removed from the individual and the person-to-person act of helping and receiving help. But it also fails when it becomes too individualized, because of simple economics: there are many fewer IT experts than there are people in need of their help, and the one-to-one dynamic begins to fail when there are so few on one side of the equation and so many on the other. Effective IT support requires a balance between the two.
One way to maintain this balance, if there is a "critical mass" of IT needs and resources, is to make the commitment to do both at the same time. At the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, we have found an effective way to do this for research computing support. We have a broad and diverse community of researchers, divided up into research groups. They have access to a core IT infrastructure of technical services, equipment and highly skilled staff to run it. But the department also has dedicated IT support staff who partner with specific groups: each group has their own person, their own IT expert, to call upon, and this person knows the people in the group and their research. We call such staff "points of contact", or POCs. Research IT support in the department is not a matter of contacting an anonymous service centre in one's moment of need, in the desperate hope of finding a sympathetic stranger with the requisite skills. Instead, it becomes an interaction between people who know each other, people who have been able to build a trust-relationship over time. Yet the economics of purely individualized support have been overcome: this organization "scales", because POCs do not need to do everything themselves. They and their groups have access to a complete infrastructure that offers common services across the entire department: secure and reliable file storage, web services, email, and more, and the expertise of the skilled technical staff that run it. POCs are freed to focus more fully on the unique, individualized needs of the research groups they serve.
Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? It is, in theory. In practice, there are plenty of challenges. Communication is key: POCs need to communicate well with their groups, and with other POCs and the core infrastructure staff. And the groups themselves need to be responsible for communicating with their POC: in human relationships, even those of IT support, there is both benefit and burden in knowing and understanding the other. A POC who is "shut out" of the research activities of the group is hampered in any effort to provide support that is well-tuned to those activites. That does not mean that poor support will result: even generic IT support, with a human face, can be superior to that offered by an anonymous service centre. But it does mean that the full benefit of having a POC will not be realized. But if a group and a POC fully commit to regular communication, the quality of IT support can be significantly greater than anything from a large service centre, because the POC who is offering that support has the potential to be a creative participant in the group's mission, the very mission that the group's use of IT is intended to serve.