Five Levels of Support

Those of us in the computer field are resigned to at least the occasional support role. If you're in the office next to the CIO, you might just want to consider it hazard duty.

But support comes in many flavors, as I'll attempt to explain these five level of support in more detail:

• Support
• support
• Fsupport
• Xsupport
• FYBYOYO

Support refers to having complete ownership of the problem and responsibility to see that the problem is fixed in a timely manner. This is the level of support that most people recognize and are familiar and comfortable providing. The lines of responsibility is clear and they're in charge.

"support", or "little-s support", occurs when someone else, like it or not, has Support, but needs your help and assistance to resolve a problem. An application developer might need some help from a performance management expert or a network trace run to diagnose an issue. Care must be taken to avoid ending up with Support in these instances.

Fsupport, or "F-support", is familiar to those of us that provide computer support for Friends and Family, the "F" becoming clear. Since Friends certainly occur in the workplace, some confusion can arise when you offer "above and beyond" service for maybe no apparent reason. Maybe you're local expert that your colleagues would rather pull into a problem than call the Help Desk. This can become a balancing act and care must be taken to pick your Friends wisely.

Xsupport, or "X-support", is easily recognized by anyone that studies organization charts. At a certain level an eXecutive, the "X" becoming clear, gets support and loving attention regardless of corporate policy, their love of non-standard computing equipment and any resemblance of a cost/benefit analysis. Need to help their spouse with that new iMac at their summer home, no problem. Just be nice and all will pass by without a career threatening cloud over your head.

That leaves us with FYBYOYO, phonetically "fib-YO-YO", that stands for "Forget You Buddy, You're On Your Own", at least in polite company. This is probably the least familiar of the five levels of support, probably because it appears in real life with the same frequency as blue M&Ms. Whether it's our love of being heroes, racking up a few markers to be called in later, not wanting to rock the boat or a truly altruistic nature, FYBYOYO is a hard stance to take. But if you're tempted, make sure to you're clear about the first four levels. They might trump you more often than you think.

Losing Twenty Percent

Information technologists live in interesting times. The Internet continues to bring the platforms and services that mostly eliminate the problems inherent in the PC-based client/server era, such as large upfront capital investments, slow deployment of new or changed services and a daunting set of security issues rooted in its birth as a non-shared technology (i.e. DOS PCs with a dinky floppy drive and molasses-slow modems) attempting to thrive in the interconnected world of email, web-based services and ever-increasing bandwidths. While using the Internet has its own scale issues, it's clear to everyone from the board room to the kid's bedroom that PC knowledge is moving down in value, and knowledge of the Internet is moving up.

Dealing with change is hardly unique to IT people, but perhaps it's the constant, year-in, year-out bombardment of change that is not as prevalent in other fields. The way I've described it to people I've been fortunate enough to work with is to set their expectation, and my own, that twenty percent of the value of their current skill set is lost every year. Just to stay even requires learning a new twenty percent each year. This obviously is an estimate, varies from person to person and is greater in some years and less in others. But overall it's not far off and the point is not precision, it's direction. Stay still for long and your risk of being obsolete gets higher and the effort to retrain to an entire new skill set becomes tougher.

A technology leader must work with each and every person to insure that this does not happen. They must provide the constant push required to change their people, and the education, projects and rewards to pull them forward. It's easier to let people stay in a job and avoid the short-term productivity hit. It's easier to let someone convince you that they're happy where they are and avoid the whining. But it's harder to change attitudes baked in over years of stagnation and retrain, for example, a mainframe COBOL programmer in Java, C++ or Ruby. If they're lucky enough to time their retirement to their obsolescence, they're in the fortunate few. Most take jobs in less demanding parts of IT or leave the field entirely.

One of the most effective methods of gaining people's attention is to purposely, publicly and continually eliminate older technologies. That elimination may take the form of outsourcing the old mainframe systems, replacing dial-up modem banks with an Internet ISP or manual PC software installation with an automated system. This is, by far, not the only benefit you'll gain from this, but emphasizing the constant "out with the old, in with the new" mantra will send strong signals throughout the organization.

Change can be overwhelming to people, particularly ones that are large or arrive as surprises. The previous suggestions deal with the surprises, but what can be done to keep change in manageable chunks? Fortunately, that's where the twenty percent comes in handy. It's not that large if handled on a continual basis. But a totally new twenty percent is much more difficult than one that is somewhat familiar. Asking a programmer that knows several languages to add Ruby to that list is nowhere near as difficult as asking them to configure routers. Asking a network analyst to configure firewalls is probably better than asking them to learn a programming language.

While keeping within one's area and learning new skills is a good tactic, the people that are very valuable have skills in many areas, ready to pitch in on just about any project that comes around. Some people seem naturally born or gifted to play in all areas, or maybe they just get bored more easily. Regardless, your organization needs to move people around departments and the earlier they learn this the better.