techcafeteria

The technology trend that defines this decade is the movement towards open, pervasive computing. The Internet is at our jobs, in our homes, on our phones, TVs, gaming devices. We email and message everyone from our partners to our clients to our vendors to our kids. For technology managers, the real challenges are less in deploying the systems and software than they are in managing the overlap, be it the security issues all of this openness engenders, or the limitations of our legacy systems that don’t interact well enough. But the toughest integration is not one between software or hardware systems, but, instead, the intersection of strategic computing and organizational culture.

There are two types of silos that I want to discuss: organizational silos, and siloed organizations.

An organizational silo, to be clear, is a group within an organization that acts independently of the rest of the organization, making their own decisions with little or no input from those outside of the group. This is not necessarily a bad thing; there are (although I can’t think of any) cases where giving a group that level of autonomy might serve a useful purpose. But, when the silo acts in an environment where their decisions impact others, they can create long-lived problems and rifts in critical relationships.

We all know that external decisions can disrupt our planning, be it a funders decision to revoke a grant that we anticipated or a legislature dropping funding for a critical program. So it’s all the more frustrating to have the rug pulled out from under us by people who are supposed to be on the same team. If you have an initiative underway to deploy a new email system, and HR lays off the organizational trainer, you’ve been victimized by a silo-ed decision. On the flip side, a fundraiser might undertake a big campaign, unaware that it will collide with a web site redesign that disables the functionality that they need to broadcast their appeal.

Silos thrive in organizations where the leadership is not good at management. Without a strong CEO and leadership team, departmental managers don’t naturally concern themselves with the needs of their peers. The expediency and simplicity of just calling the shots themselves is too appealing, particularly in environments where resources are thin and making overtures to others can result in those resources being gladly taken and never returned. In nonprofits, leaders are often more valued for their relationships and fundraising skills than their business management skills, making our sector more susceptible to this type of problem.

The most damaging result of operating in this environment is that, if you can’t successfully manage the silos in your organization, then you won’t be anything but a silo in the world at large.

We’ve witnessed a number of industries, from entertainment and newspapers to telephones and automobiles, as they allowed their culture to dictate their obsolescence. Instead of adapting their models to the changing needs of their constituents, they’ve clung to older models that aren’t relevant in the digital age, or appropriate for a global economy on a planet threatened by climate change. Since my focus is technology, I pay particular attention to the impacts that technological advancement, and the accompanying change in extra-organizational culture (e.g., the country, our constituents, the world) have on the work my organization does. Just in the past few years, we’ve seen some significant cultural changes that should be impacting nonprofit assumptions about how we use technology:

• Increased regulation on the handling of data. We’re wrestling with the HIPAA laws governing handling of medical data and PCI standards for financial data. If we have not prioritized firewalls, encryption, and the proper data handling procedures, we’re more and more likely to be out of step with new laws. Even the 990 form we fill out now asks if we have a document retention plan.


• Our donors are now quite used to telephone auto attendants, email, and the web. How many are now questioning why we use the dollars they donate to us to staff reception, hand write thank you notes, and send out paper newsletters and annual reports?


• Our funders are seeing more available data on the things that interest them everywhere, so they expect more data from us. The days of putting out the success stories without any numbers to quantify them are over.

Are we making changes in response to these continually evolving expectations? Or are we still struggling with our internal expectations, while the world keeps on turning outside of our walls? We, as a sector, need to learn what these industrial giants refused to, before we, too, are having massive layoffs and closing our doors due to an inability to adapt our strategies to a rapidly evolving cultural climate. And getting there means paying more attention to how we manage our people and operations; showing the leadership to head into this millennia by mastering our internal culture and rolling with the external changes. Look inward, look outward, lead and adapt.

Last week I had the thrill of visiting a normally closed-to-the-public Science Building at UC Berkeley, and getting a tour of the lab where they examine interstellar space dust collected from the far side of Mars. NASA spent five or six years, using some of the best minds on the planet and $300,000,000, to develop the probe that went out past Mars to zip (at 400 miles a second) through comet tails and whatever else is out there, gathering dust. The most likely result of the project was that the probe would crash into an asteroid and drift out there until it wasted away. But it didn’t, and the scientists that I met on Saturday are now using these samples to learn things about our universe that are only speculative fiction today.

So, what does NASA know that we don’t about the benefits of taking risks?

In my world of technology management, it seems to be primarily about minimizing risk. We do multiple backups of critical data to different media; we lock down the internet traffic that can go in and out of our network; we build redundancy into all of our servers and systems, and we treat technology as something that will surely fail if we aren’t vigilant in our efforts to secure it. Most of our favorite adages are about avoiding risk: “It it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” and “Nobody was ever fired for buying IB.. er, MicroSoft.”

On Monday, I’ll be presenting on my chapter of NTEN’s Book “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission” at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. My session, and chapter, is about mission-focused technology planning and the art of providing business-class systems on a nonprofit budget. That’s certainly about finding sustainable and dependable options, but my case is that nonprofits, in particular, need to identify the areas where they can send out those probes and gamble a bit. For many nonprofits, technology planning is a matter of figuring out which systems desperately need upgrading and living with a lot of systems and applications that are old and semi-functional. My case is that there’s a different approach: we should spend like a regular business on the critical systems, but be creative and take risks where we can afford to fail a bit, on the chance that we’ll get far more for less money than we would playing it “safe” with inadequate technology. It’s a tough sell, yes, but I frame it in my belief that, when your business is changing the world, your business plan has to be bold and creative. As I mention often, the web is, right now, a platform rife with opportunity. We will miss out on great chances to significantly advance our missions if we just treat it like another threat to our stability.

We need stable systems, and we often struggle with inadequate funding and the technical resources simply to maintain our computer systems. I say that, as hard as that is, we need to invest in exploration. It’s about maximizing potential at the same time as you minimize risk. And its all about the type of dust that you want to gather.

I had big plans for another insightful, deep, break-down-the-walls-of-the-corporate-culture-that-diminishes-use-of-technology post today, but I think I’m gonna save it for a rainy day and write something a bit more useful, instead.  I have a big nonprofit technology conference coming up this weekend, as you might, as well, and I think we should all be resting up for it.

The most important skill for any IT staff person to have is the ability to communicate.  All of the technical expertise in the world has little value without it, because, if you can’t tell people what you’re doing, what you’re doing won’t be well-received.  And there is an art, particularly with tech, to telling people what you’re doing, whether it’s taking the system down for maintenance of upgrading staff from Notepad to Office 2007.

Here are my five rules for crafting an technical email that even my most computer-phobic constituents will read:

1. Let no acronym go unexplained.

   The simplest, worst mistake that techies regularly make is to tell people that

   “The internet will be down while we reconfigure the DHCP server” or

   “The database will be unavailable while we replace the SCSI backplane”.

   Best practice is to avoid the technical details in the announcement, if possible.  But if it’s relevant, speak english: “In order to accommodate the growth of our staff, we need to reconfigure the server that assigns network resources to each system to allow for more connections.”

2. Be clear, concise and consistent in your subjects

   Technical messages should have easily recognizable subjects, so that staff can quickly determine relevance.  If your message is titled “Technical Information”, it might as well be titled “You are getting sleepy…”  But, if it’s titled “Network Availability” or “Database Maintenance Scheduled”, your staff will quickly figure out that these are warnings that are relevant to them. Don’t worry about the Orwellian aspect of announcing system downtime with a message about availability.  The point here is that using the consistent phrasing will grab staff’s attention far more effectively than bolding, underlining and adding red exclamation points to the email (see rule 4).

3. Keep it short and simple

   It’s about what the staff needs to know, not what you’d like to tell them.  So, the network maintenance email should not read:

   “The systems will be down from 4:30 to 9:00 tonight while we replace drives in the domain controllers and run a full defrag on the main document server”

   It should read:

   “The network will be unavailable from 4:30 pm until 9:00 pm while we perform critical maintenance”.

   If it’s only a portion of the network, but something useful will be up – as when the file servers are being repaired, but email is still available, make a note of that: “While the main servers will not be available, you will still be able to send and receive email”.

4. No ALL CAPS, no exclamation points and go sparingly on the bold

   System downtime might be urgent to you, but it’s never urgent to the staff.  It’s a fact of life.  A reply from the Director of Online Giving that the downtime will jettison a planned online campaign is urgent; not your routine announcement.

5. Tell the whole story

   ...even if this sounds like it conflicts with rule 3.  Because there are two types of people on your staff:

   • The majority, who want simple, non-techie messages as described above
   • The rest, who want the gory details, either so they can rest easy that you aren’t making anything up, or because they’re actually interested in what you’re up to.
   
   

   My approach is to do the simple message and, below it type, “Technical Details (optional reading)”.  In this section I might explain that we’re replacing the server that processes their network logins (I won’t use “DHCP” or “Domain Controller” if I can help it) or that we’re upgrading to the new version of Outlook.

The key concepts here are consistency, simplicity, and a focus on what impacts them regarding what you’re doing.  Stick to it and, miraculously, people might start reading your all staff emails.

Non Profit social media maven Beth Kanter blogged recently about starting up a residency at a large foundation, and finding herself in a stark transition from a consultant’s home office to a corporate network. This sounds like a great opportunity for corporate culture shock. When your job is to download many of the latest tools and try new things on the web that might inform your strategy or make a good topic for your blog, encountering locked-down desktops and web filtering can be, well, annoying is probably way to soft a word. Beth reports that the IT Team was ready for her, guessing that they’d be installing at least 72 things for her during her nine month stay. My question to Beth was, “That’s great – but are they just as accommodating to their full-time staff, or is flexibility reserved for visiting nptech dignitaries?”

The typical corporate desktop computer is restricted by group policies and filtering software. Management, along with the techs, justify these restrictions in all sorts of ways:

• Standardized systems are easier, more cost-effective to manage.


• Restricted systems are more secure.


• Web filtering maximizes available bandwidth.

This is all correct. In fact, without standardization, automation, group policies that control what can and can’t be done on a PC, and some protection from malicious web sites, any company with 15 to 20 desktops or more is really unmanageable. The question is, why do so many companies take this ability to manage by controlling functionality to extremes?

Because, in many/most cases, the restrictions put in place are far broader than is necessary to keep things manageable. Web filtering not only blocks pornography and spyware, but continues on to sports, entertainment, politics, and social networking. Group policies restrict users from changing their desktop colors or setting the system time. And the end result of using the standardization tools to intensively control computer usage results, most often, in IT working just as hard or harder to manage the exceptions to the rules (like Beth’s 72, above) than they would dealing with the tasks that the automation simplifies in the first place.

Restricting computer/internet use is driven by a management and/or IT assumption that the diverse, dynamic nature of computing is either a distraction or a problem. The opportunity to try something new is an opportunity to waste time or resources. By locking down the web; eliminating a user’s ability to install applications or even access settings, PC’s can be engineered back down to the limited functionality of the office equipment that they replaced, such as typewriters, calculators and mimeograph machines.

In this environment, technology is much more of a controlled, predictable tool. But what’s the cost of this predictability?

• Technology is not fully appreciated, and computer literacy is limited in an environment where users can’t experiment.


• Strategic opportunities that arise on the web are not noticed and factored into planning.


• IT is placed in the role of organizational nanny, responsible for curtailing computer use, as opposed to enabling it./

Cash and resource-strapped, mission-focused organizations only need look around to see the strategic opportunities inherent in the web. There are an astounding number of free, innovative tools for activism and research. Opportunities to monitor discussion of your organization and issues, and meaningfully engage your constituents are huge. And all of this is fairly useless if your staff are locked out of the web and discouraged from exploring it. Pioneers like Beth Kanter understand this. They seek out the new things and ask, how can this tool, this web site, this online community serve our sector’s goals to ease suffering and promote justice? More specifically, can you end hunger in a community with a widget? Or bring water to a parched village via Twitter? If our computing environment is geared to stifle innovation at the cost of security, are we truly supporting technology?

As the lead technologist at my organization, I want to be an enabler. I want to see our attorneys use the power of the web to balance the scales when we go to court against far better resourced corporate and government counsel. In this era of internet Davids taking down Goliaths from the RIAA the the mainstream media, I don’t want my co-workers to miss out on any opportunities to be effective. So I need the flexibility and perspective to understand that security is not something that you maintain with a really big mallet, lest you stamp out innovation and strategy along with the latest malware. And, frankly, cleaning a case of the conflickr worm off of the desktop of an attorney that just took down a set of high-paid corporate attorneys with data grabbed from some innovative mapping application that our web-filtering software would have mistakenly identified as a gaming site is well worth the effort.

Flexibility has it’s own Return on Investment (ROI), particularly at nonprofits, where we generally have a lot more innovative thinking and opportunistic attitude than available budget. IT has to be an enabler, and every nonprofit CIO or IT Director has to understand that security comes at a cost, and that cost could be the mission-effectiveness of our organizations.

Say you sign up for some great Web 2.0 service that allows you to bookmark web sites, annotate them, categorize them and share them. And, over a period of two or three years, you amass about 1500 links on the site with great details, cross-referencing—about a thesis paper’s worth of work. Then, one day, you log on to find the web site unavailable. News trickles out that they had a server crash. Finally, a painfully honest blog post by the site’s founder makes clear that the server crashed, the data was lost, and there were no backups. So much for your thesis, huh? Is the lesson, then, that the cloud is no place to store your work?

Well, consider this. Say you start up a Web 2.0 business that allows people to bookmark, share, categorize and annotate links on your site. And, over the years, you amass thousands of users, some solid funding, advertising revenue—things are great. Then, one day, the server crashes. You’re a talented programmer and designer, but system administration just wasn’t your strong suit. So you write a painful blog entry, letting your users know the extent of the disaster, and that the lesson you’ve learned is that you should have put your servers in the cloud.

My recent posts have advocated cloud computing, be it using web-based services like Gmail, or looking for infrastructure outsourcers who will provide you with virtualized desktops. And I’ve gotten some healthily skeptical comments, as cloud computing is new, and not without it’s risks, as made plain by the true story of the Magnolia bookmarking application, which recently went down in the flames as described above. The lessons that I walk away with from Magnolia’s experience are:

• You can run your own servers or outsource them, but you need assurances that they are properly maintained, backed up and supported. Cloud computing can be far more secure and affordable than local servers. But “the cloud”, in this case, should be a company with established technical resources, not some three person operation in a small office. Don’t be shy about requesting staffing information, resumes, and details about any potential off-site vendor’s infrastructure.
• You need local backups, no matter where your actual infrastructure lives. If you use Salesforce or Google, export your data nightly to a local data store in a usable format. Salesforce lets you export to Excel; Google supports numerous formats. Gmail now supports an Offline mode that stores your mail on the computer you access it from. If you go with a vendor who provides virtual desktop access (as I recommend here), get regular snapshots of the virtual machines. If this isn’t an over the air transfer, make sure that your vendors will provide DVDs of your data or other suitable medium.
• Don’t sign any contract that doesn’t give you full control over how you can access and manipulate your data, again, regardless of where that data resides. A lot of vendors try and protect themselves by adding contract language prohibiting mass updates and user access, even on locally-installed applications. But their need to simplify support should not be at the expense of you not having complete control over how you use your information.
• Focus on the data. Don’t bend on these requirements: Your data is fully accessible; It’s robustly backed up; and, in the case of any disaster, it’s recoverable.

Technology is a set of tools used to manage your critical information. Where that technology is housed is more of a feature set and financial choice than anything else. The most convenient and affordable place for your data to reside might well be in the cloud, but make sure that it’s the type of cloud that your data won’t fall through.

My friends at Blackbaud referred me to this excellent post by Jay Love, CEO of ETapestry, once a small donor database service, now a subsidiary of the mother of all donor database companies. Jay’s timely caution to nonprofits is that they be skeptical about all of the for-profit folk answering their employment ads in the face of the poor economy. People from that side of the dollar fence are generally unprepared for the culture of nonprofits. His story about vendors trying to break into our sector with no experience or research into our needs is fascinating. But I have a different take on hiring people from the for-profit world, and while Jay seems t be saying “don’t do it”, I’m on the “be sure to do it – in moderation” side.

Of course, the healthy disclaimer is that I never worked for a nonprofit, or knew all that much about the culture, before I took a job at Goodwill in late 2000. But I did have enough sense to pick an NPO that ran more like a traditional business than most, at least in some ways, and I took some time to adjust to the culture before I tried to push through any changes. Which isn’t to say that I blend all that well – I’m one of the people complaining that we move to slowly and that consensus is not a value, it’s a tool that, like most tools, is better suited for some tasks than others.

Any business (and nonprofits are businesses) benefits from diversity, just as any business benefits by retaining internal expertise. Businesses suffer when they lean too far in one direction or the other. If your hiring policy is to only hire people who are lifetime nonprofit workers, you run the risk of stifling innovation and you court stagnation. The world doesn’t sit still around us, so we have to dynamically adapt to it. A key tool for managing that adaption is to maintain a diversity of experience and skills in your organization.

Think about it: ten or fifteen years ago, non-profits were largely unregulated. There was no HIPAA. There was no Sarbanes-Oxley, which, while not designed for NPOs, is generally agreed to impose guidelines on us. There was no PCI compliance, the next wave of external oversight that will demand that we modify our processes and investments. Beyond the 990 and what we chose to disclose about our outcomes, there was little demand for detailed metrics. These are all circumstances that the for-profit world, with traditional government oversight and accountability to shareholders has dealt with for decades. We need some of that expertise.

Of course, it’s a scale, and just as we can suffer from cultural insulation, we can suffer by turning over too dramatically. While I would steadfastly debate that we need some of that for-profit perspective on board, I’ve seen a few examples of for-profit executives that take over as CEOs and—because the nonprofit style is so antithetical to the big business style—quickly replace everyone that, to them, looked like they weren’t up to the task of running “a business”. This type of culture change, in a nonprofit, is deadly, because it is a misconception to think that we can run like normal businesses. When that happens, the nonprofit runs the risk of losing all of the internal historical expertise, as the people who aren’t squeezed out don’t stick around for the cultural change, and the new execs face the budgeting challenges with no perspective to draw on.

So, a businessman like me – and I absolutely consider myself a businessman—gets frustrated with the slow pace at the nonprofits that I work for. And I beg, moan and try and shame my boss into adopting more business-like practices. But I don’t sweat it too much, because, at the end of the day, even if we don’t do things in the efficient and productive ways that I’m so stuck on adopting, we still do an amazing job of defending the planet, or, you can fill your mission in here. I’d hate to see it fall apart because we didn’t properly comply with regulations or we simply didn’t manage our resources well, and we have to staff to address that. So my shoutback to Jay Love is that the bunker mentality is a bit much. Let a few for-profit types in the door. But, until they understand and value our culture, don’t let them drive.

My big post contrasting full blown Microsoft Exchange Server with cloud-based Gmail drew a couple of comments from friends in Seattle. Jon Stahl of One/Northwest pointed out, helpfully, that MS sells it’s Small Business Server product to companies with a maximum of 50 employees, and that greatly simplifies and reduces cost for Exchange. After that, Patrick Shaw of NPower Seattle took it a step further, pointing out that MS Small Business Server, with a support arrangement from a great company like NPower (the “great” is my addition – I’m a big fan), can cost as little as $4000 a year and provide Windows Server, Email, Backup and other functions, simplifying a small office’s technology and outsourcing the support. This goes a long way towards making the chaos I described affordable and attainable for cash and resource strapped orgs.

What I assume Npower knows, though, and hope that other nonprofit technical support providers are aware of, is that this is the outdated approach. Nonprofits should be looking to simplify technology maintenance and reduce cost, and the cloud is a more effective platform for that. As ReadWriteWeb points out, most small businesses—and this can safely be assumed to include nonprofits—are completely unaware of the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization. If your support arrangement is for dedicated, outsourced management of technology that is housed at your offices, then you still have to purchase that hardware and pay someone to set it up. The benefits of virtualization and fast, ubiquitous Internet access offer a new model that is far more flexible and affordable.

One example of a company that gets this is MyGenii. They offer virtualized desktops to nonprofits and other small businesses. As I came close to explaining in my Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine post, virtualization is technology that allows you to, basically, run many computers on one computer. The environmental and financial benefits of doing what you used to do on multiple systems all on one system are obvious, but there are also huge gains in manageability. When a PC is a file that can be copied and modified, building new and customized PCs becomes a trivial function. Take that one step further – that this virtual PC is stored on someone else’s property, and you, as a user, can load it up and run it from your home PC, laptop, or (possibly) your smartphone, and you now have flexible, accessible computing without the servers to support.

For the tech support service, they either run large servers with virtualization software (there are many powerful commercial and open source systems available), or they use an outsourced storage platform like Amazon’s EC2 service. In addition to your servers, they also house your desktop operating systems. Running multiple servers and desktops on single servers is far more economical; it better utilizes the available server power, reducing electricity costs and helping the environment; and backups and maintenance are simplified. The cost savings of this approach should benefit both the provider and the client.

In your office, you still need networked PCs with internet access. But all you need on those computers is a basic operating system that can boot up and connect to the hosted, virtualized desktop. Once connected, that desktop will recognize your printers and USB devices. If you make changes, such as changing your desktop wallpaper or adding an Outlook plugin, those changes will be retained. The user experience is pretty standard. But here’s a key benefit—if you want to work from home, or a hotel, or a cafe, then you connect to the exact same desktop as the one at work. It’s like carrying your computer everywhere you go, only without the carrying part required.

So, it’s great that there are mission focused providers out there who will affordably support our servers. But they could be even more affordable, and more effective, as cloud providers, freeing us from having to own and manage any servers in the first place.

I’ve been pretty fascinated by the news reports about how the Obama staff reacted to the technology in place at the White House. If you haven’t been tracking this, you can read the full story, but the short story is this: the Mac/Blackberry/Facebook-savvy Obama staffers were shocked to find ancient systems and technology in use at the White House – Windows XP, MS Office 2003, traditional phone lines, and web filtering in place – in other words, the same stuff my org uses. I found myself both sympathetic and skeptical regarding their plight, because I am a big fan of all of the new technology that they are familiar with, but they walked into a network that is a lot like 90% of the businesses out there. The Bush Administration, perhaps surprisingly, was fairly current in their use of technology.

Some quick things I draw from this:

• The Obama campaign distinguished themselves by their smart use of modern, internet technology, and that use played a major role in their successful campaign.

• The shock they’re facing is less about the technology in place than it is about the culture they’re moving into. Political teams run freely and nimbly, and Howard Dean established the Web as the infrastructure of choice in 2004. Businesses, like the White House, do not drive so close to the cutting edge, for a variety of good reasons, such as the need for standardization and security.

• Over the next few months, the Obama-ans are going to compromise, and I’m dying to learn what choices they’ll make.

In my work, I’m on both sides of that fence every day, working with staff to understand why we have to standardize in order to manage our systems, stay a little behind the curve in order to avoid risk, and stick with applications like Microsoft Office because they have the mature feature set that we require. At the same time, I rally my staff to be creative in finding tools and solutions for our people, to stay abreast of which new tools are going to be worth the risk in terms of the benefits they offer, and understand that, should we get too far behind, it will be as risky as being too far out on the technological edge. We don’t want to fall off of any cliffs, nor do we want to stand still as all of the other cars race around us.

Some of us, like the leader of the free world, can’t imagine a day without a Blackberry; others, like a former free world leader, don’t even want an email account. Most of us live in this world where we have to creatively embrace the new while we tighten our grips on the traditional, because technology platforms thrive on stability while they obsolesce rapidly. Where the Obama White House winds up might be a good indicator of where we should all be. I hope we’ll have a window into that.

Friends of mine who are active on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are fond of proclaiming that email is dead. And, certainly, those of us who are active on these networks send less email to each other than we used to. I’m much more likely to direct message, tweet, or write on someone’s wall if I have a quick question, comment or information referral for someone, the latter two if it’s a question or info that I might benefit from having other people in my online community see.

But I don’t see these alternatives as ships carrying the grim reaper onto email’s shores—I think they’re more likely the saviors of email. As I said a couple of weeks ago in my “Myth of KISS” post, email applications are heavily abused, and they’re not very good at managing large amounts of information. This hasn’t stopped a good 90% of the people online from using email as their primary information aggregator. We get:

• Personal emails


• Mailing List items


• ENewsletters


• Automated alerts


• Spam!


• and a host of other things

in our email inboxes every day. The inbox places new messages on top and older messages scroll down and out of sight. Almost every email program on earth lets you, as you make time for it, pull emails into named folders, mark them as important, order them by name or date or subject, search for them, and archive them to some other part of your storage space, but none of them do more than some basic filtering and prioritizing for you, perhaps IDing 90% of the spam and, if you’re a power user, allowing you to place messages from certain people in special folders.

The exception to the standard email processing rules is Google’s GMail, which does innovative threading and labeling, allowing for, in my opinion, a superior tool for information management, but it’s still a lot of work. The tools will improve, but it’s kind of like hiring a better maid service to clean up congress – they’ll make the halls shinier, but the same legislators will show up for work on the next day.

The answer is to acknowledge that email applications, as we know them, were never meant to process upwards of twenty or thirty messages a day. The information management defaults assume a manageable number of items, and many of us are way past that threshold. The power of alternative messaging mediums is that they are tailored to the types of messages they deliver, and their tools sets are accordingly more refined and targeted. If you get newsletters and alerts in your email, switch to RSS. If you do a lot of short messages or work coordination, look at IM. If you announce or broadcast information, or survey your contacts, use Twitter or Facebook. These mediums are, so far, much less susceptible to spam, and you can ignore messages once you’ve read them or skipped them, they don’t have to be deleted. The closer you get to only receiving personal email in your inbox, the easier it will be to keep up with it

So these new mediums aren’t gunning to eliminate our old, old electronic friend – they’re just allowing it to go on a long overdue diet.

If you’re in a job that involves supporting technology in any fashion, from web designer to CIO, then the odds are that you do help desk. Formally or not, people come to you with the questions, the “how do I attach a file to my email?”, the “what can I do? My screen is frozen”, the “I saved my document but I don’t know where”. Rank doesn’t spare you; openly admitting that you can do anything well with computers is equivalent to lifetime membership in the tech support club.

A full time tech support job is, for the most part, an extended roller coaster ride with more down slopes than up. People who are drawn to this work are generally sharp, eager to assist, and take pride in their ability to debug. The down side is that, day after day, it’s grueling. There’s always a percentage of people who would just as soon smash the machine and go back to their trusty Selectrics. They aren’t always happy or polite with the friendly tech who comes to help them.

But the most debilitating aspect of the work is that support techs don’t manage their workload. It’s randomly and recklessly assigned by the varying needs of their co-workers and the stability of their systems. They never know when they’re going to walk in the office to find the donor database is crashed, or the internet line is down. The emails come in, the phone rings, and, to the people calling, everything is a crisis. Or it certainly seems that way. The end result is that career support techs often develop a sense of powerlessness in their work, and the longer it goes on, the less able they are to take proactive action and control of their jobs.

So here are two complimentary actions that can be taken to brighten the life and lighten the load of the support tech.

1. Deploy a trouble ticket system. And make sure that it meets these specifications:

• Incredibly easy for staff to use. Web-based, linked from their desktop, with, ideally, three fields: Name, priority and problem. The software has to be able to grab additional information automatically, such as the time that the ticket was submitted, and, optimally, the user’s department, location and title, but the key point is that people won’t use the system if the system is too annoying to use.


• Every update is automatically emailed to the user and the tech. This is critical. What an automated trouble ticket does best is to inform the customer that their issues are being addressed. Without this communication in place, what stands out in user’s minds are the tickets that haven’t been resolved. Confirmations of the fixes, sent as they occur, validate the high rate of responsiveness that most help desks maintain.


• Be clear that the scope of the problem will influence the response time. Fixes that require spending or input from multiple parties are not slam dunks. This communication might warrant additional checkboxes on the submission form for “requires budget” or “requires additional approvals”, but formalizing this information helps the customer know that their issue hasn’t just been dropped by the tech.


• Have a default technical staff view that puts open tickets on top. In environments where the telephone is the primary support funnel, things get forgotten, no matter how good and organized the tech is.

There’s more to it – good ticket systems feed into, and include links to additional support resources. And they don’t replace the telephone – IT has to be readily available. But there should be an understanding that users follow up phone calls with tickets. These are the key strategies that help the seemingly unmanageable stream of support calls fall in line.

2. Allow the support staff to breathe. There has to be an understanding, primarily understood by the support tech, but reinforced by his or her manager, teammates and staff, that only emergencies demand emergency response times. In fact, treating every call as an equally important, must be fixed immediately situation is a strategy for failure. Support Techs need to do effective triage, and put aside time to analyze and act proactively to solve user problems. If they deal with the same questions over and over, they have to write and publish the solutions. If the calls indicate a common problem that can be solved with a better application or an upgrade, they need to be able to step back and assess that. Smart managers will enforce this measured approach. At first, it will go against the grain of service-oriented staff, but it’s a must, because the measured response begets the more comprehensive solution to any problem.