You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking with some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations or typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or "secondary" referring to support roles. But you're an IT person - You're a support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely you're overhead.
With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your own existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social situation?
> You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking > with > some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert > cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations > or > typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or > "secondary" referring to support roles. But you're an IT person - You're a > support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely > you're overhead.
> With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the > value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your own > existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social > situation?
First of all, I don't see how IT can even remotely be considered overhead - when it's done right. It's like saying eating breakfast is overhead. It's the fuel that gets you started and allows you to perform at a higher level than you would without it.
Somebody could have crap for breakfast and that /is/ a problem, but it doesn't mean that breakfast is the problem. The modern world is infused with technology. It's a catalyst, an essential element and the oxygen that pumps life into ideas, energy and output created by top-performing businesses.
*Work* needs to be performed to provide a service or product of value. Errors cost time and money. What I do is create automated processes and tools that perform work 24x7x365 and help people do the same all while eliminating or reducing errors. *Decisions* need to be made constantly in order to compete. I create reports and tools that allow people across the organization to access the information they need to make decisions. *Performance* and systems need to be monitored in order to assess the health, revenue, output and productivity of the organization, specific segments or individuals. I provide the monitoring, reporting and data collection inputs that make this possible. *Knowlege, collaboration* and *experience* is often the key to making better judgements and increasing productivity. Coupled with smooth * operations* of *communications*, plant, equipment, vendor, customer and marketplace *relationships*; knowledge can be put to work to the greatest effect. I provide the collaboration systems, documentation, training, operations and multiple levels of support to ensure that this happens.
I don't think I'd come up with that off the cuff, after having a couple drinks at a cocktail party. But now that you've asked, I should commit it to memory so that I can.
A long time ago, I found that you are 'overhead' if you are not in the 'Business of the Business'.
If you are in healthcare doctor or a nurse, you are in the business, if you are mopping the floors in a hospital, doing IT, doing accounting, you are overhead.
If you a banker or teller you are in the banking business, if you are in IT, or marketing, or greeters, you are 'overhead'.
If you are a 'boss' and not the highest on the food chain, you are overhead.
If you are at Walmart (or generic big box store of any flavor) and aren't checking folks out (like stockers, cleaners, truck drivers, etc) you are overhead.
If you are working for a IT service provider (consultant, computer operator) you are in the business of the business, if you check badges or are security, or make sure the backup generators work, you are overhead.
If you are in sales, and don't get enough sold so the bosses see you as 'profitable' and an 'income earner', you are overhead. A friend is a sales guy, and his company just let go of many sales droids because they 'didn't make the numbers', even though the market is down especially in the low performing areas (regions, states, districts, or other geographical organization). (His business sells chemicals to put in concrete to make concrete act differently ... contact me directly if you want to discuss this.)
Whatever you do that isn't directly in line of causing cash income, is overhead. Even if you are and you don't cause 'enough income' you can be considered 'overhead'. (Enough isn't just enough to pay for your and expenses, it is enough to pay the entire boatload of expenses, costs, fixed overhead, etc, even before 'profit' is in the picture.)
This is a life observation, not theoretical, also it isn't right or wrong, it just is.
To me, it seems like whatever internal infrastructure it takes to keep a business working is critical to the business existence should be important, but if you are not a direct cause of cash coming in the door (this quarter) you are considered overhead.
Once I realized this truism, it has made several 'changes' in life more palatable and enabled me to get on with life. Before that, I stewed on it, grumped, whined, complained, and couldn't let go.
Yes, I have been caught on both sides of layoffs, downsizing, 'reallocation of assets', whatever it is called, if a paycheck stops you feel like you are fired.
I have also had 'survivors syndrome'. Wondering why someone else and not me. It happens in war, in business, basically everywhere. It is real and must be delt with in some way. It is easier for some than others to go through this 'grief' period. Just like a death or being fired, having those around you 'gone' carries it's own psychological weight.
Ohhh. ... sorry, this is getting into a lot of my baggage and what I have carried. Hopefully this will give someone some insight and help them.
All this 'advice' is personal and anecdotal, so isn't worth a hill of beans to pull any 'facts' or 'statistics' from.
> You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking with > some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert > cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations or > typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or > "secondary" referring to support roles. But you're an IT person - You're a > support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely > you're overhead.
> With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the > value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your own > existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social > situation?
I suggest something like this:
"I'm one of the team that makes sure the computers, networks, telephones, power, fire alarms, printers, and cell phones are always working. In short, I'm the guy who keeps the magic smoke from leaking out of the wires, because computers run on magic smoke, and if it leaks out, things stop working. I like to think I do my job well, and the measure of my team's success is that you've probably never heard of us."
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking with > some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert > cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations or > typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or > "secondary" referring to support roles. But you're an IT person - You're a > support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely > you're overhead.
> With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the > value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your own > existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social > situation?
The CFO is overhead too. Overhead means that an expense isn't directly allocatable to a particular item sold. It isn't a accounting-speak for "non-productive". Is system administration helping the firm reduce costs and/or raise output, or is it part of the "Department of Information Prevention"? Whether its support or empire-building, it is overhead either way.
> You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking with > some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert > cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations or > typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or > "secondary" referring to support roles. But you're an IT person - You're a > support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely > you're overhead.
> With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the > value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your own > existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social > situation?
Having been both in management and in overhead positions. In many businesses there are cost centers and revenue centers. IT is usually a cost center providing essential services. But, IT is a cost that in many cases cannot be tied directly to revenue. This is one reason why many companies moved their customer service groups to India. At Digital, years ago, we moved the entire Unix commands group the Bangalore, and my group (compilers, development environment) moved the assembler support to India. (We ended up writing a new assembler in the long run). Basically up the hierarchy, senior managers look at things quite differently than we do. For instance, in a Windows shop with a few Linux servers, management might look at the LInux support team as overhead, and decide to train some of the Windows people. especially in tough times, managers are under severe pressure to reduce costs. A good manager will look at both the savings and risks.
Years ago, we were told in a meeting that we were supposed to arrive by 9 and not leave before 5. Why did our manager tell us that. He used to get complaints from other departments that they would see us come in late and leave early. But, what they did not see was programmers coming in late at night for fire calls. They didn't see programmers finishing up projects late at night so that accounting could have "cost of goods sold - french fries". It is the responsibility of the department manager effectively manage his/her department, but also communicate to upper management.
But, to more specifically answer the question, you look at your role and possibly say that we are the people who keep the infrastructure up and running 24X7.
-- Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
> The CFO is overhead too. Overhead means that an expense isn't directly > allocatable to a particular item sold. It isn't a accounting-speak for > "non-productive". Is system administration helping the firm reduce > costs and/or raise output, or is it part of the "Department of > Information Prevention"? Whether its support or empire-building, it is > overhead either way.
Certainly, but you don't tell a senior manager that he/she is overhead :-)
-- Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
> You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking > with > some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert > cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations > or > typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or > "secondary" referring to support roles. But you're an IT person - You're > a > support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely > you're overhead.
> With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe > the > value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your > own > existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social > situation?
There are a few ways to answer this question.
(1)Compared to a CEO, the value proposition is much better for "support." A CEO typically makes over 100x an average worker. So, you are one 100th of a CEO. Yet you help others be more productive. Your value multiplies the value of others.
(2)Quite frankly, as maligned as IT is, a modern company can not run without IT. The modern company needs data and data infrastructure for decision making and (depending on the nature of the business) creation of the "product."
(3)Being almost 50, I remember a professional world where people did not use computers. Watch the tv show "Mad Men." There were secretarial pools of women who merely typed. Invisible as IT is, it is necessary, and has allowed the workforce to change in such a a way that menial jobs once relegated to a "lower class" of worker is now expected from everyone, and that "lower class" of worker no longer exists. Employees now present a more and richer value proposition for the employer because they do more than menial tasks.
(4)The modern executive in a company must be able to evaluate several more orders of magnitude more data than his counterpart did a generation or two ago. The spreadsheet, originally seen as a tool for for accounting, has become the defacto tool for managing business and creating strategies. The IT and support staff make this possible on the scale required for modern business.
Hi, I'm looking into an email encryption for both my company and for personal use. For personal use I would like to be able to encrypt Gmail accounts using Droid, Outlook and possible via the web portal. I noticed that some of you have already some kind of encryption like PGP. Looking at some products, it seems that now Symantec owns PGP, any other product that you would suggest that just do what I'm looking for?
> On 12/15/2011 10:56 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: >> You're in a social situation - at a party or something - You're talking with >> some CFO or otherwise interesting financial person about work, and Dilbert >> cartoons, and the wastefulness and inefficiencies of typical corporations or >> typical organizations, etc. Somebody uses a term like "overhead" or >> "secondary" referring to support roles. But you're an IT person - You're a >> support role, and depending on what is your core business, most likely >> you're overhead.
>> With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the >> value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your own >> existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social >> situation? > Having been both in management and in overhead positions. In many > businesses there are cost centers and revenue centers. IT is usually a > cost center providing essential services. But, IT is a cost that in many > cases cannot be tied directly to revenue.
Perhaps. Even when IT isn't the "business of the business" as another poster described, IT in my opinion has the most potential for impacting things directly related to revenue: employee efficiency, marketing, research, etc. IT pervades everything a company does. IT in many cases is what sets good/great companies apart from their competitors.
So the biggest thing you need to do IMHO is not let people conflate "overhead" with "non-essential". All senior management is overhead. That doesn't mean they are non-essential. Great IT, just like great senior management, give the company a competitive edge. I think you could make a strong argument that great IT gives /more/ of an edge than pretty much anything else (where "great" IT means being cost-efficient as well as capability-rich).
> At Digital, years ago, we moved the entire Unix commands group the > Bangalore, and my group (compilers, development environment) moved > the assembler support to India.
Ouch. You can't be successful in business by outsourcing your core technical competency. Unfortunately, many businesses didn't figure this out until after they'd tried and failed.
> So the biggest thing you need to do IMHO is not let people conflate > "overhead" with "non-essential".
Just to beat this horse a little more: "overhead" is a technical term for accountants; "non-essential" is a judgment call about value to the company and the core business. There is no implicit linkage between the two terms, unless the person you're talking to is an idiot.
In which case you should have a few more cocktails before continuing the conversation ;-)
> With only a moment's thought, and only a few words, how do you describe the > value that your role adds to the organization? How do you justify your own > existence, casually, when talking to a CFO or somebody in a social > situation?
I'm the guy who fixes the mail server and recovers your mail after the disk fails on Christmas Eve.
On 12/16/2011 12:07 AM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
> First of all, I don't see how IT can even remotely be considered overhead - > when it's done right. It's like saying eating breakfast is overhead. > It's the fuel that gets you started and allows you to perform at a higher > level than you would without it.
Simple: we don't generate revenue but we are necessary so that those who *do* generate revenue can be about generating that revenue. That's overhead.
Over the years, I've learned that the answer to this question is: you can't.
If someone asks it in those words or similar, then if they had their druthers they'd call Amazon EC2 or some place in Bangalore and say, "I'll have two of those, how much do they cost?" just before shutting you and everyone you care about down.
Even if the answer from India is "more than you thought you'd have to pay", they'd still rather send the money outside the firm. Because that way they have someone else to blame when things go awry.
I've tried but never succeeded with principled arguments about how a 3-fold reduction in costs, plus a 10-fold improvement in reliability, and/or all the other cerebral ways of demonstrating that a cost center succeeds in its mission by making the company more successful and more competitive versus those who rely on third parties. In the end, they'll keep you if they trust you, and they ditch you if they don't.
So rather than coming up with a fancy spreadsheet about your department's cost-saving and performance-boosting successes, strive to make yourself the one they trust to fix whatever ails them: usually it'll boil down to some silly office desktop app on a 4-year-old Mac, or the like, and not some million-dollar initiative that kept the company out of insolvency.
> Here are a few personal truisms about 'overhead'.
> A long time ago, I found that you are 'overhead' if you are not in the > 'Business of the Business'. > If you a banker or teller you are in the banking business, if you are > in IT, or marketing, or greeters, you are 'overhead'.
+1. This was an important realization I came to during my years working on Wall St. (And is one of the main reasons why I no longer work there.)
> Over the years, I've learned that the answer to this question is: you can't.
> If someone asks it in those words or similar, then if they had their druthers > they'd call Amazon EC2 or some place in Bangalore and say, "I'll have two of > those, how much do they cost?" just before shutting you and everyone you care > about down.
> Even if the answer from India is "more than you thought you'd have to pay", > they'd still rather send the money outside the firm. Because that way they > have someone else to blame when things go awry.
I pity the corporate culture where this happens. Because at the end of the day, customers and investors alike don't give a crap if you have a good excuse, they want results. A company that tolerates managers with the attitude you describe is one that is broken and likely headed down hill...
Someone whose primary goal is blame avoidance is someone I would run away from as fast as I could. They aren't going to go anywhere, and if they somehow do manage to climb the corporate ladder in spite of their pile of failures, it won't be in a way that will be in any way beneficial to you (i.e., you're likely the one he threw under the bus to get himself a promotion).
> Someone whose primary goal is blame avoidance is someone I would run > away from as fast as I could. They aren't going to go anywhere, and if > they somehow do manage to climb the corporate ladder in spite of their > pile of failures, it won't be in a way that will be in any way > beneficial to you (i.e., you're likely the one he threw under the bus to > get himself a promotion).
sadly though, i think this is the exact formula used by many to find 'success' in the corporate world. and you are right, that if it comes down to them or you getting thrown under the bus, you can guess how it will come out. [regardless of what actually happened or who made what decision]
while i am sometimes delighted by someone taking unexpected altruistic action [even just 'telling the truth'], i am rarely disappointed when i expect people to act in the most selfishly destructive manner possible. especially among the 'powerful' in industry or politics.
> while i am sometimes delighted by someone taking unexpected altruistic > action [even just 'telling the truth'], i am rarely disappointed when i > expect people to act in the most selfishly destructive manner possible. > especially among the 'powerful' in industry or politics.
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Matthew Gillen <m...@mattgillen.net> wrote: > In which case you should have a few more cocktails before continuing the > conversation ;-)
In my case this usually leads to me telling them exactly what I think of them.
> Hi, > I'm looking into an email encryption for both my company and for personal use. For personal use I would like to be able to encrypt Gmail accounts using Droid, Outlook and possible via the web portal. I noticed that some of you have already some kind of encryption like PGP. Looking at some products, it seems that now Symantec owns PGP, any other product that you would suggest that just do what I'm looking for?
We generally use OpenPGP (or GnuPG) for our email. This is supported by many email clients either directly or via plugin. PGP is a company that sells and licenses their technology. There are both OpenSource ad well as commercial products that add PGP encryption to Outlook. However, I am not aware of an encryption product for any web-based email. I certainly can sign or encrypt Gmail using Thunderbird. There is a product called OpenPGP Manager for Android (http://pgpmanager.blogspot.com/). I have not used this, although it is now a project for this weekend. Maybe someone could add to this.
-- Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
> On 12/16/2011 09:03 AM, aldo albanese wrote: >> Hi, >> I'm looking into an email encryption for both my company and for personal use. For personal use I would like to be able to encrypt Gmail accounts using Droid, Outlook and possible via the web portal. I noticed that some of you have already some kind of encryption like PGP. Looking at some products, it seems that now Symantec owns PGP, any other product that you would suggest that just do what I'm looking for? > We generally use OpenPGP (or GnuPG) for our email. This is supported by > many email clients either directly or via plugin. PGP is a company that > sells and licenses their technology. There are both OpenSource ad well > as commercial products that add PGP encryption to Outlook. However, I am > not aware of an encryption product for any web-based email. I certainly > can sign or encrypt Gmail using Thunderbird. There is a product called > OpenPGP Manager for Android (http://pgpmanager.blogspot.com/). I have > not used this, although it is now a project for this weekend. Maybe > someone could add to this.
> On 12/16/2011 09:44 AM, Matthew Gillen wrote: >> So the biggest thing you need to do IMHO is not let people conflate >> "overhead" with "non-essential".
> Just to beat this horse a little more: "overhead" is a technical term > for accountants; "non-essential" is a judgment call about value to the > company and the core business. There is no implicit linkage between > the two terms, unless the person you're talking to is an idiot.
> In which case you should have a few more cocktails before continuing > the conversation ;-)
Good advice. The issue is that top management looks at numbers. They also compare their numbers with the Industry. When HP acquired Compaq, HP had a very high IT expense in comparison to the industry. Part of this was a result of acquisitions. When Mark Hurd took over from Carly Fiorina, he hired a new IT VP who was charged with placing this expense in line with the industry. (I was engineering). Just about every little group had their own data center. There was also a large amount of duplication, a number of different business systems accomplishing the same task. The solution was to build 4 new modern data centers in the US to replace the many local and regional centers. Last year, for instance, they moved the Marlborough data center that was used for porting and testing of client applications to Houston. The employees (my former coworkers) were told they had to work from home. There was also a restriction on some products some departments could buy. One senior engineer was very pissed because he was not allowed to buy something like Adobe Acrobat. The bottom line is just that. A company like HP looks at percentages. How many people do you need to support Windows desktop systems, and do they have to be local. Can a support person in Dallas support a user in Boston? With respect to servers,, nearly all new servers are now installed with some form of remote console where there is rarely a need for anyone to enter the physical data center.
-- Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
> You wrote: >> Justify your existence > Over the years, I've learned that the answer to this question is: you can't.
> If someone asks it in those words or similar, then if they had their druthers > they'd call Amazon EC2 or some place in Bangalore and say, "I'll have two of > those, how much do they cost?" just before shutting you and everyone you care > about down.
> Even if the answer from India is "more than you thought you'd have to pay", > they'd still rather send the money outside the firm. Because that way they > have someone else to blame when things go awry.
> I've tried but never succeeded with principled arguments about how a 3-fold > reduction in costs, plus a 10-fold improvement in reliability, and/or all the > other cerebral ways of demonstrating that a cost center succeeds in its > mission by making the company more successful and more competitive versus > those who rely on third parties. In the end, they'll keep you if they trust > you, and they ditch you if they don't.
> So rather than coming up with a fancy spreadsheet about your department's > cost-saving and performance-boosting successes, strive to make yourself the > one they trust to fix whatever ails them: usually it'll boil down to some > silly office desktop app on a 4-year-old Mac, or the like, and not some > million-dollar initiative that kept the company out of insolvency.
Just look at Dell. After years of pushing their great support, they moved it offshore. While my few times when I called Dell support before they moved it, I was never impressed. But a lot of people did not like the foreign accent, and this actually caused Michael Dell to take the reigns of the company again. But, their reputation took a serious hit.
-- Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
I strongly object to being characterized as someone who "did not like the foreign accent". And, based on my own experiences with Dell's support, I think that for most people who disliked Dell's offshoring of their support function, that characterization is wholly inaccurate.
I've been a software engineer since my first job writing BASIC interpreters and OS internals at DEC in the 1970s. But by the late 1990s I was a Unix expert, not an MS-DOS or Windows expert. So, although I've never expected Dell's support people to have the same level of understanding of OS concepts that I do, I did expect them to have specific knowledge about Windows that I didn't. And before Dell made their disastrous decision to move support out of the U.S., the level of support met my expectations. When I called them for help, I was able to have an intelligent conversation with the support person handling my call. There was an interactive back-and-forth in the conversation, the result of which was that their knowledge plus my knowledge allowed us to solve my problem.
After Dell fired their U.S. support people and outsourced the function to India, I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with their support people. During my calls to them over the first few years after they did that, I naively assumed the support people were technically knowledgeable, and I continued trying to engage them in technical conversation to solve my problem, but that was always impossible. I'd say something and they'd respond with a complete non-sequitur. It took me years to figure out that: 1) they didn't have a clue what I was talking about, and 2) unlike the technical people I know who, when they don't understand what you're saying, will ask you questions until they do understand, Dell's outsourced support people would simply pretend to understand - which behavior inevitably resulted in absurd non-sequiturs, as well as them wasting huge amounts of my time.
After a few years of this, I figured out that Dell must have replaced the technically-knowledgeable U.S. support staff that they laid off, with un-knowledgeable but cheap staff, and then tried to make up for that abysmal decision by training them to read pre-written scripts. It was also clear that the outsourced support staff was being incentivized to close calls rather than to solve problems. So they were more than happy to give you a totally unworkable or irrelevant solution as long as they could get you off the line. If you had to call back again 10 times. that was somebody else's problem, not theirs.
Since customer objections to the extreme degradation of Dell's service were too often mischaracterized in the same way you just mischaracterized them, as people not liking the foreign accent, management in Round Rock, TX came up with the idiotic solution to simply look for other countries with cheap workers whose English sounded less accented to American ears. So a few years later, I found I was talking to clueless people in the Philippines or in Panama instead of clueless people in India.
At some point during a call to Dell's outsourced support, I remembered a Dilbert strip I'd seen years before, in which the support rep tells him to do something ridiculous like reinstall the OS, the next panel shows him twiddling his thumbs, and in the next panel he tells the support rep, "OK, I've done that." When I first saw that strip, I thought it was a funny joke. But after years of frustration with Dell's atrocious time-wasting "service", I stopped thinking of it as a joke and started thinking of it as a strategy. I tried it, and it worked far better than trying to hold an intelligent technical conversation with them. Eventually I started trying to predict the contents of their pre-written script, and figure out which answers would help me navigate them through the shortest path in their script to get to the point where they were willing to send me the particular replacement part I needed. And, given their history of having wasted so much of my time, I no longer felt I needed to zero in on the right replacement part. If I could narrow it down to one of 2 or 3 parts, I was happy to have them ship one part and send a tech out to swap it, and if that didn't work I'd call back and manipulate their script-readers through their script to the next replacement part I wanted to try. With a company that didn't make a business out of wasting my time, it would never have occurred to me to do that. I can't be the only one who figured this out. Over the years, I'm sure Dell must have spent far more money on supporting customers' systems than they could possibly have saved by firing their technically knowledgeable U.S. support staff. And they've also generated a great deal of ill will in the bargain.
This is what happens when management manages by the numbers and is totally out of touch with their customers.
Mark Rosenthal m...@arlsoft.com <mailto:m...@arlsoft.com>
On 12/17/2011 9:40 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Just look at Dell. After years of pushing their great support, they > moved it offshore. While my few times when I called Dell support before > they moved it, I was never impressed. But a lot of people did not like > the foreign accent, and this actually caused Michael Dell to take the > reigns of the company again. But, their reputation took a serious hit.
> After Dell fired their U.S. support people and outsourced the function > to India, I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation > with their support people. During my calls to them over the first few > years after they did that, I naively assumed the support people were > technically knowledgeable, and I continued trying to engage them in > technical conversation to solve my problem, but that was always > impossible.
My experience with Dell was very spotty since I have no Dell stuff, and it was only for a friend or client. "I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with their support people" This is the key. You want to be able to have an intelligent conversation with a support person and to be able to understand. I had a few times to contact Compaq support (before HP). I found back then that the Indians were much more technically competent that the non-Indians. On a single issue, I had a couple of US people who gave me the wrong answers, where when I spoke to an Indian, he gave me exactly what fixed the problem.
First, many people have trouble with some foreign accents, and I believe that this was one of the major Dell user complaints. Whoever you speak to should be reasonably articulate and easily understandable. Second, the person should be knowledgeable enough to either identify and solve your problem or escalate it to someone who does.
My recent conversation with the RCN customer service person was that he told me: 1. While I paid for a "static IP", since you had only a single static IP it was only a sticky and he refused to budge. 2. We were paying for an 8-IP subnet not a single static. The issue comes under that category of intelligent conversation. I had the bill in my hand. What they failed to do was to move the subnet over from the 20/2 DOCSIS 1 modem to the DOCSIS 3 modem as was required by the contract. My problem is I had a SonicWall that could only be programmed by our IT department. The only thing I could have done was to do a factory reset, get it on some working network, and then let IT reprogram it. I told him that, but I didn't tell him that I had 2 other networks in the same computer room. In any case they finally fixed the problem after I yelled and screamed.
The bottom line is it does not matter where the support people are. It is a matter of training.
-- Jerry Feldman <g...@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
