Big Brother IT! (personal rant)

I hate our IT department and the way the company views IT!

from JoeUser Forums
How many of you out there are restricted to doing something on your computer? How many out there waste away a significant amount of time at your work dealing with the pain in the a$$ IT department of your companies?

Well, my IT department deemed it necessaryto migrate my user account from one domain to another and guess what, all my Outlook settings and everything else, which made my world comfy and cozy is gone and I had to migrate a bunch over myself. Pain in my A$$. I figure I am going to waste some of my day away here at work trying to get everything I had setup back to normal, so I can become productive again. I expect to waste a half day of work getting there... hmmm seems like if a portion of the 200 employees have to spend as much time doing this, then that is a TON of wasted money the company has spent just to migrate domains.

Having ranted, in the IT department's defense, there are only 2 (3rd just hired as a temp) tech support guys, 1 scripter who is busy with other things and an INCOMPETENT IT manager, who has no background in IT other than the experience she has gained since when she became manager of the IT department here at my company as far as I know only through knowing someone and being their bud.

sooo I probably don't have Admin rights on my laptop anymore and my life will be difficult for a while. Of course my job title is Test Engineer and I will frequently have to make changes on the settings for my laptop, so if I don't get Admin rights back, I WILL find a way to make it required to perform my job function. :)
7,143 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Speaking from an IT support angle, 99% of my support time is wasted on neanderthals who should be using stone tablets instead of a pc.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
I can respect that, but if you intend to perform some sort of upgrade or modification, please remember who you work for. I couldn't find some files and all I had to do was search for *.pst to find them, but that is something easily forgotten. I am also not your average neanderthal, but an educated neanderthal!

Who the customer is.

It is not yourself nor your ego, but the person's computer you are modifying. Unfortunately, most of the 'customers' have no say with managment, let alone upper management as to the quality of the service being performed. Perhaps that is why so many IT jobs are outsourced to outside companies.

Plan for it and transitions of any type will be smooth and easy. Test quite a bit first, then put together a FAQ or something to answer the common questions.
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I always thought MS had support tools for corporate customers... And not just for them actually.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
but the person's computer you are modifying


Herein lies the problem - it's not your computer, it belongs to the Company. So many people treat their work computer as their own property. Creates havoc with software licensing etc. Most PCs fail due to some form of unauthorised customisation the user has performed. Users should always store important documents (especially .pst files) on the file server and not the local hard drive so it can be backed-up on a daily basis.

A PC is just an end of line tool and should be treated as such.
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
i'm with Relswick on this. The IT guys should have automated that migration and made it go a little smoother. With an app like Outlook, there's no excuse for it to be left out for the end users to set up. I feel for ya, man, and all those employees forced to do their own administration.
Reply #6 from JoeUser Forums Top
ALWAYS backup MS Outlook's address book, as well as all the rest of their crappy apps. Trust me here... I was a software tester for Microschlock before i became a network build engineer.
Reply #7 from JoeUser Forums Top
Hey Fuzzy....

Um, about it being MY computer, well that is a phrase. I agree, it is the Companies property and everything, which is on it, belongs to the Company. However, if you migrate My Computer, it is a laptop by the way, then every file on it should become accessible as it was before. My work files, i.e. the Company's files should be ready to go right away, not some sort of well, it is there, but you have to find it OR even setup the computer the way you had it before... but we have beat that horse dead.

What we are talking about, however, is the fact that IT should take into account the productivity gains or losses, whenever IT decides to perform some sort of modification to the IT infrastructure. Like I said, the IT department at my company is NOT a very good one. I have worked at Ford, where the IT group I worked with took all these things into account. Of course, when you are talking upgrading thousands of PCs to the next OS, you kind of have to as well as making it easy.
Reply #8 from JoeUser Forums Top
In an ideal work environment, "Every file on your workstation" should consist of NOTHING. All the data files that you work with should be stored on the network. If you're working on a file while you're disconnected from the network (since this is a laptop), that's fine, but you should synchronize it with your networked copy ASAP after returning. The only stuff that should reside locally on your system is program files.