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Tales of helpdesk woe - really that funny?
Would we tolerate this level of incompetence in any other field?

By editorial@silicon.com

Published: Tuesday 13 August 2002

We've all heard tales of helpdesk woe.

For instance, there's the woman who pressed the F1 'Help' button on her keyboard and waited for desktop support to appear. ("It's not the Bat phone, you know.") Then there was the woman who used her CD ROM drive tray as a coffee cup holder - or the office full of people using their mouses like sewing machine foot pedals.

Of course these are funny - and who are we to spoil everyone's fun - but should we not be looking into this a little more seriously?

Society would not tolerate such shortcomings in any other profession.

The costs of such incompetence can only be imagined and should be a cause for concern at board level - even if such tales remain amusing on the 'shop floor'.

If you have one member of staff spending the whole day pressing F1 and waiting for somebody to appear, then do the maths.

If it's somebody earning the average wage you're losing around £8 per hour. Multiply that by the thousands of similar tales you've heard and we're talking serious sums of money.

Then throw in the time/salary being wasted by skilled helpdesk staff answering these enquiries and the damage done by malicious file attachments opened in error and the downtime and time spent backing up files peripheral to such threats and the picture becomes even more worrying.

A survey released today suggests employee IT illiteracy poses the largest single threat to a company - and it's not the first time the accusation has been levelled and well supported.

The questions that need to be addressed are manifold. Is the IT department being forced to waste valuable resources on what should be an HR issue? Should the board be looking to send everybody on courses - spending money in the short term to save money in the long term? Is the widespread idiocy of the UK workforce holding back genuine innovation by wasting the time of technical minds? We want to know what you think.