Downtime Revisited
Every workplace has an office tech expert. Someone who knows how to use Excel formulas, can put up a good fight with a gnarly mail merge, and knows what temp files are and why they should be cleared.
They’re valuable people to have on your team. If only more of your employees were so clever with the computer, your business would hum.
Shadow support may seem harmless, but it’s actually taking two employees away from their jobs. That’s double-downtime.
Unfortunately, not everyone’s strength is software or logic — and that’s just fine. (I can’t do my own taxes; that’s why I outsource it to my mother.) However, you cannot continue relying on the office computer guy forever. As much as he saves your office’s collective rear-end on a regular basis, the time he’s spending doing something other than his job is costing you dearly.
There are two types of downtime: unavoidable and avoidable. Unavoidable downtime includes hardware malfunctions or network connectivity problems — problems that will always exist and are really just part of running an IT infrastructure.
Avoidable downtime is where the office expert comes in, and includes shadow support, self-help, and no help at all.
Shadow support is defined as one employee asking a colleague (the office tech “expert”) for assistance with their problem. While it may seem harmless, it’s actually taking two employees away from their primary job functions to solve a problem. That’s double-downtime.
Other instances of avoidable downtime include self-help, which is a proven time waster; and no help at all, which means employees are finding unreliable workarounds.
Both hurt you in the end (see an earlier post, Chaos Among the Calculations) and all three affect your TCO, or total cost of ownership.
According to research performed by Cap, Gemini, Ernst & Young, non-IT employees spend nearly 136 hours per year trying to solve computer-related problems. In an ongoing end-user survey conducted by PC Helps Support over the past 15 years, knowledge workers estimate that without an immediate, reliable outlet for software application support, they would spend an average of three hours per incident trying to resolve the question or problem on their own.
The productivity impact of this avoidable downtime is huge. If a worker making $52,000 annually spends three hours on one solution without support, that costs you $75. That same worker will likely need help on other software issues four times per year, which bumps up the cost to $300. In a company with 1,200 end-users, with a 50 percent population call projection, each seeking help four times per year: 600 x $300 = $180,000. Huge, indeed. (Jen Darr)
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This is very true. Having outsourced computer support that employees can call upon to resolve problems quickly can save money for companies of all sizes and is a godsend for small businesses who don’t even employ tech staff.
This is an excellent post on a topic that I think very few people, especially managers, understand or even contemplate. I am definitely the in the role of “office tech expert,” and I do spend a great deal of time helping others with ad-hoc computer support issues.
As my career as progressed, however, I’ve become more aware of the drain this places on my productivity. I enjoy helping others, but it can be a major distraction, and it’s definitely not what my company is paying me to do. I have begun trying to take more of a “teach how to fish” rather than “give a fish” approach, as I think this better serves everyone in the long run. However, it’s very difficult to wean people off of getting that convenient, in-department support.
I agree with Eddie. I am also my office tech expert, and, while it’s a nice boost to the ego to be the go-to person when someone needs help, it definitely hinders my ability to do my job. The thing is, I don’t think everyone needs to know the software like the back of their hand. I think they just need to have more “experts” who can help them when they need it.