The whining class

Nearly a generation ago, in 1981, the debut of the IBM PC ushered in the personal computing era of business, a wondrous event in the history of computing that led to the immediate birth of one of the most thankless tasks in IT: desktop support.

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I was only nine years old at the time and far more interested in my baseball card collection than the PC, but I can only imagine how average office workers puzzled over that 4.77MHz machine with 64KB of RAM. I'm sure the tedium of loading DOS into memory via a floppy and having to switch out floppies to actually run applications drove people nuts, and IT staff thrust into end-user support roles must have had trouble explaining what was truly a new paradigm for business operations. Fast forward to the present and, by comparison, computers are incredibly easy to use. Whether you're a corporate user enjoying the elegance of OS X on your desktop or the vastly improved Windows OS (remember Windows 3.1?), you have it easy compared to the brave office citizens blazing new computing trails in DOS just a generation ago.

So why, 23 years after the birth of the corporate PC, does a stubborn slice of corporate users still struggle with basic computer literacy? As home computers have become nearly as common as televisions and the UI concept of "point and click" has become integrated into everyday culture, the situation has improved during the past several years, but in every office there are still people who are utterly flummoxed by computers. Based on my own anecdotal experience and conversations with other IT managers, the help desk spends about 75 percent of its end-user support time supporting 5 percent of the user base. Anyone who works in IT could rattle off a list of these five-percenters at the drop of a hat. In the meantime, the other 95 percent seem to get their jobs done with entirely reasonable levels of assistance.

To be clear about supporting the demands of the five-percenters, I'm not talking about dealing with the often unavoidable problems of end-user IT: hard drive crashes, random hardware problems, and even random spyware infections. Those things happen to everyone. I'm referring to problems that arise from a lack of basic computer skills, such as managing and finding files, and basic working knowledge of suites such as MS Office. If I was running an IT shop back in 1981, I would understand the sense of total displacement brought on by the PC and expect to provide plenty of gentle hand-holding as people adjusted to the new environment. That disruptive era is long over, though, and I think it's now reasonable to expect professional knowledge workers to bring a basic level of computing know-how to work with them.

In the end, it's tempting to dismiss talk of the five-percenters as useless old-school IT complaining about pesky end-users that is more fit for a Dilbert comic strip than a column written for CTOs, but that would be glossing over critical issues about the costs of computer illiteracy to business. Like all resources, IT resources are ultimately finite and as end-user support services evolve to measurable and metered, per-employee, pay-as-you-go models (Centerbeam and Everdream are examples), the offenses of the five-percenters could become painfully clear not just to the CTO, but to the CFO as well. Anyone who has worked in business knows of at least one person who has been called to the CFO's office to defend a reckless cell phone bill. Are those who excessively use IT support next in line?