Edit: Another relevant post with things to consider, it still holds up today.
Originally posted March 4, 2008 on AIXchange
A while back I injured my knee and needed treatment. My doctor referred me to a specialist, who had me fill out some forms since I was a new patient. When I met with the nurse, she looked over my forms and entered the information into the computer. While doing so, she called up my entire patient history, which included details about older prescriptions that I’d forgotten to include on the form. She could do this because the specialist and my primary physician had access to the same database of patient information.
I’ve experienced something similar when calling my ISP to report a network outage. A technician would bring up my call history to access information about issues I’d previously reported. I’ve seen the other side of this, too. I’ve contacted help desks that either didn’t maintain or didn’t bother to check my call history. Instead of immediately responding to my problem, they wasted my time getting basic information. It wasn’t that the technicians were rude or incompetent, but their companies just seem less professional, especially when I compare those encounters to my experiences with the ISP.When supporting users, the more information we track and act upon, the better. I try to be proactive by monitoring machines and networks. When users contact me, I find it extremely helpful to have their call history available. Is the user calling about the same printer problem? Then maybe some hardware needs to be fixed, or the user needs some training.
A friend was telling me about his efforts to figure out why an important network device was intermittently going down at his company. Whenever he thought he’d resolved the issue, it would resurface. It turned out that a user who’d taken an extended leave of absence was periodically coming into the office with a laptop and a dedicated IP address, and that was causing the network conflict. But my friend only figured it out because he checked the problem reports and correlated that with the data being logged on the network.
Systems and network monitoring–along with good ticket-tracking software and procedures–can provide first-level support personnel with the information they need to resolve user problems. Chances are, your company is engaged in these practices. But if you’re not, and you find yourself putting out the same fires and handling the same kinds of problems, maybe it’s time to rethink the way you’re doing things.