“This will create tremendous savings and greater efficiencies” the official email, distributed to thousands upon thousands, read. The bottom line will improve, your work life will become easier, dogs and cats will, after long centuries of bitter warfare waged since antiquity, finally find peace.
“In today’s competitive environment”, the email’s author continued, revealing the business-press philosopher within, “change is the only constant. We must all be ready to adapt at a moment’s notice. This is a change for the better in the way we handle IT issues and nothing to fear.”
Well, she was right, change did indeed come. Unfortunately, it was similar to the sort of change that occurs when you go from being sober -- or, to put it another way, functional -- to falling down drunk.
...
Whereas before a fretful workstation user or ‘application owner’ could pick up his or her desk phone and call a friendly workstation, server, application or infrastructure expert who would attend to their problem – a person sitting no more than an elevator ride away – now they have to browse to a special website and put in a ‘service ticket’. This ‘ticket’ is then placed in an electronic queue handled by a person sitting in front of a workstation many thousands of miles away in the far away ‘help desk’.
The distant worker consults a listing of appropriate responders to the user’s dilemma and assigns the issue to the person best suited (according to a location and job description database) to handle the problem. The local worker receives an email alert, examines her individual queue, finds the task assigned and begins to work on the problem.
Because of this remarkable innovation in process engineering, it recently took 2 months to resolve a problem that, prior to help desk offshoring, might have eaten no more than 15 minutes.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
Thus through the miracle of advanced telecommunications and wise management is ‘greater efficiency’ achieved -- by forcing a local user to submit her IT-related problems to a distant worker so it can be assigned to another local worker who may only be 75 feet away. Perhaps even someone she had lunch with earlier that very day.
DRM