Let's play pass the buck.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Ya know what pisses me off?

When the hundred-and-twenty-nine zillion I.T. project groups that churn out their own little digital mathoms decide that they should have a contact number in their app in case an end-user has a question.

And that the contact in question should not be anyone who can support the project, or even knows that the project exists, but instead should be the generic I.T. Helpdesk number.

"My screen is saying to call you." Is it, now. And that application is what, exactly? No, I've never heard of it. It's not in our list of supported in-house software. We have no idea what you're talking about, or who to call about it.

Oh, when you DO find out who wrote it, please kill them for us, plskthx.

Comments

[tmercenary.livejournal.com]

We did a flow chart of tech support for new apps like that. We did one that showed how we were doing things, were people could add any software, and one how we needed to change it, so they couldn't without the IT department being involved from top to bottom.
Once we implemented the latter, it worked much better.

[megpie71.livejournal.com]

As someone who's working at the same place as the_s_guy, I can point out that yes, we're rolling out something similar to what you describe above. Whether it will be effective is a different question altogether, since it depends on buy-in from staff and managers who currently do what they want, when they want to, and with very little reference to any of the current documented procedures and processes, far less any of the new ones.

As far as I can tell, there's been no volunteers in upper manglement for the job of "Ground Zero" who would be responsible for getting the whole thing behaving properly, so my cynicism is still fairly high about the overall effectiveness of the whole bushwah.

[tmercenary.livejournal.com]

The key for us was to modify everyones rights, and take away the ability to install software except for IT and a few "powe users" scattered around that we knew would be able to handle it.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Every email that our company sends out has the support address on it. This includes sales, provisioning and general info. It's great when our marketing team comes up with another dumbfuck idea with no basis in reality and spams it out to 100,000 people.

Never mind the fact that the email itself may be confusing and full of crap, but customers take the opportunity to reply with any number of ludicrous requests, ongoing complaints etc etc..

I love the marketing department. They live in a fucking fantasy land.

[jecook]

And this is different from the marketing department in any other company how??

I am convinced that the "marketing budget" is in reality the slush fund for buying drugs for the people that come up with all the ludicrist ideas in the first place.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

I'd agree with you, but generally mind-altering substances enhance imagination and creativity, they don't corrupt. Well, the good ones anyway. Considering the marketing budget and the ideas they come up with, it seems this company has a shitty dealer.

P.S Ludicrous. I only mention it because it is one of my most favourite and oft-used words.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

"Prepare for... LUDICROUS SPEED!"

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Hah! I see your schwartz is as big as mine!

[japester.livejournal.com]

that's almost as bad as the router things (home use, not business) from a few years ago that had their default ntp server set to the University of Western Australia physics department's atomic clock.
Ever slagged a clock?