What end users hate about you

By Jennifer Mears and Ann Sullivan
Network World, 07/30/01

Admit it. You love to rag on end users. RinkWorks' Computer Stupidities site is overwhelmed with anecdotes from IT professionals about stupid end users. In fact, the site has a backlog of 800 postings and is not accepting new submissions.

But have you ever wondered what those end users really think about you, the network professional?

Are users right or are they being babies? Give us your 2 cents in our forum.

We asked more than a dozen users about their biggest IT pet peeves. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, reluctant to end up with hard drives deleted or network access severed. Still, it should be noted that most prefaced their fault-finding comments with positive observations. With that in mind, think about whether you're guilty of committing these most-hated offenses.

Geek speak

Sometimes the most talented IT people are the least effective instructors because they can't communicate well and don't understand that end users operate on a different level, says Dave, a public relations professional in Massachusetts. He equates them to athletes-turned-coaches: "Good athletes sometimes have a hard time coaching because they don't understand people who aren't as good or don't hustle as much as they did."

The same is true of IT people who assume their users know more than they really do.

Tom, a Washington, D.C., architect, adds that age can be a factor in the communication gap. "The biggest complaint I have is that the IT guys are in their mid-20s. We old farts who didn't grow up with PCs in our homes and took PASCAL and FORTRAN and Lotus 1-2-3 have a difficult time understanding what they're talking about half the time," he says.

Customer disservice

Customer service is not just about helping external clients - for the IT department, its customers are internal.

"Our IT department has never heard of customer service," says an account executive at an insurance agency in Denver. "I'm amazed at their total lack of recognition of the fact that without us out bringing in new business and retaining the clients we have [through superior customer service], they would not even have jobs. Not to mention, they are too important to ever answer their phone."

Service interruptus

A public defender in Nebraska says that having one IT group for the entire county means sometimes the IT technician who started to fix a problem isn't around to finish it.

"When I call back and ask to speak to the same tech, I am informed that the person is somewhere else, that the techs are not assigned to specific offices, and that the first available person will be sent," she says. "While I appreciate the effort at quick response time, the new tech inevitably shows up while I am out of the office so I can't fill them in on the problem or the attempts at fixing it. Sometimes I can't even explain what the other tech attempted to do. I wish there was better information sharing within our information services or that the techs would be assigned to particular offices."

Covert missions

The IT department rarely explains exactly what it's doing or why, unless asked, says Philadelphia architect Richard Killeen. The IT group at his firm planned to run an audit of each user's PC a few months ago, he says. "This was prefaced by a brief e-mail describing how they would be coming to each station to perform an audit. Period. Now, since I associate the word 'audit' with something pretty bad [i.e. taxes], I panicked and called the helpline for more information."

Killeen learned the audit is a fairly routine procedure - not a mission to expose his Web-surfing habits or personal e-mail discussions. But he had to make a phone call to find out, when it would have been so easy for IT to have added a sentence to the e-mail describing the procedure.

Impatience

Yes, users don't follow instructions. Yes, they repeat their mistakes. And yes, they even ask stupid questions. User Joe acknowledges that when questions are low-level, easy stuff, IT people may feel they are wasting their time. "I guess that probably leads to the inevitable bad attitude and condescension toward staff," he says.

Joe's suggestion? "IT people should have an unbelievable amount of patience, much more than typical people - and to keep in mind that even though they're dealing with morons, they should keep it a private joke from other staff," he says.

Inability to admit defeat

"I don't always feel confident that the IT person has a clue what to do or will tell me honestly if they don't. I really like it when one of them says, 'You know what? I don't know. Let me check and get back with you.' That's what I tell clients when they ask a question I don't know the answer to," says David, a Virginia lawyer.

When IT staff insists on forging ahead in unknown territory, the result can be "half-baked solutions," he says. For example, when his firm upgraded Microsoft Outlook, a subfolder of his contacts was omitted from the message creation field. "So I asked how to get it back, and she just fiddled around and ended up dumping all those from the subfolder into the main contact folder," he says. "Oh, thanks a bunch. Now my college buddies and car detailer are listed in the general contact list, which incidentally is linked through interaction to a general firmwide list. That's obviously not what I was looking for. She tells me I can hide them from interaction but that's not the point. That's just how she figured out to get the job done, instead of doing the real job."

Inflexibility

A naval officer on a U.S. aircraft carrier complained about controls from above that restricted how he could customize his desktop. Adding a shortcut was about all he could do, he says. "Everything else pretty much required administrator privileges. . . . It's ridiculous."

Slow on the uptake

Problems happen, sure, but IT needs to understand that employees simply want to get back to business. That means getting a quick fix or knowing what the issue is so they can work around it, says Sue, an account executive at an insurance firm in Denver.

"We have had several instances where our e-mail functionality, an extremely important tool in our daily contact with clients, has gone down, without our knowledge, and our clients did not receive e-mails sent for periods of up to five days before we were notified. This, as you can imagine, led to several deadlines not being met and caused our clients to doubt our ability to get the job done," she says. "When the help desk is called to assist with an IT issue, they are extremely slow to respond and seemingly unaware or apathetic toward the urgent deadlines that we must meet."