Time to Fire the Technically Illiterate?
Tim the IT Guy brings up an interesting point about how companies could save costs in a down economy: fire people who monopolize your internal IT departments due to technical incompetence:
[Bosses]can no longer afford to pretend that it's okay that you don't understand Excel, since they have to pay to have someone on site who can explain it to you. Every dollar spent paying an IT guy is a dollar not spent doing whatever it is that makes the company money. That's why it's time companies everywhere get out of the handholding business.
One way to do this would be to log how much IT support time each of your employees use. Compare that to their productivity. You may be able identify a few people who seem rather productive before you account for the $10,000 a year in IT time they're consuming.
This could help you determine who needs training or who just has to go.
In that case, it's all the directors at my company that would get the boot.
Interesting... As long as its not a hard-and-fast rule, that makes some sense. Logging the number of calls / tickets / and time always makes sense, regardless.
For custom software, your IT guys can just make some custom Flash-based training videos. There's lots of free software out there that can do exactly this.
would it fair to suggest that perhaps hiring people who are technologically competent in the first place is the best solution? in our current economy, or for the last 10 years for that matter, i cannot imagine hiring someone that sucked the IT teet to the company's detriment.
maybe there's a clear dividing line between small/med/and large company opinions on this topic.
great stuff.
In a past life I ran a tech support department. It never ceased to amaze me how many callers didn't realize that their monitors were turned off. I used to ask them if they saw a little green light on it and would sometimes have them check for a cord and then trace it to an electrical outlet so I would not have to say "is it plugged in?" It was always the few who took most of our time.
1. Posted by: Aaron on November 28, 2008 3:28 PM:
Or just listen to your IT guy when he says "[so and so] need to go."