When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...
"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."
My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken."
The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining.
I had some colleagues use the alpha of a new shiny thing the company was building. But none of them ever reported bugs to the bug tracker, because it was "too complicated and nothing ever happened". So the company had someone flying down to our offices and do a presentation on how the (homegrown) bug tracker works. It was a simple, 18-step process just to file a bug... turned out, it was even worse for developers handling those bugs. Yet, people pointing that out where looked at like the were from mars :/.
Your boss had a good point. At some point, users become savvy to the whole thing and stop complaining and start trying to fix it on their own.
It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there.
It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.)
Or they will stop using the system altogether and that's when you start having these unofficial shadow systems spring up, developed by someone who read Access For Dummies in 7 Days, and next thing you know you've got 250,000 credit card numbers posted on pastebin.
that's when you start having these unofficial shadow systems spring up
Exactly what happened to me today.
An engineer [1] opened up a ticket because some java code he was developing to insert attachments to our BOM system was returning funny errors.
Which is fine except he'd somehow gotten credentials for my production system and was testing his code against live bits.
Hooray for initiative, but good lord, fella: how would you feel if I ran out on the floor and started testing new widgets on equipment we're building for customers?
There is a correlated phenomenon that might be at work: many help desk calls are a result of what happens after a user tries to "fix it" themselves. Users may be sufficiently ignorant under Linux that they've reduced the number of steps they take "outside the box".
When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...
"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."
My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken."
The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining.
[1] He was retiring in a few months.