IT centralization gone wrong

When IT centralized support, support became terrible. What went wrong?

Dear Bob ...

Our IT support was recently moved to a centralized organization. In our organization this is a small group of people who keep the network running, install and maintain the desktop PC's, handle disk shares, backups, etc.

What is interesting is that we basically just moved the people to a different organization. Having the same number of people doing the same job makes it hard to understand how we have saved any real money. However, we have given up control to a centralized group. What does this mean?

1. When the a server broke last week, the centralized group had control over fixing it. A week later this wasn't done, so the people at our division are doing things by hand, or in some cases not doing it at all.

2. Our Exchange server got moved off site, so performance has suffered, and services, e.g. archiving, need to be negotiated with the central group.

3. Our straightforward ticket management system got replaced with the arcane system used by the central group. They wanted to put 300 people through a one hour training class on how to use it, and management balked because the old system required no training, and why did they want to spend 300 person hours on such a waste of time and money? Turns out the new system is so tricky to use that it might have been a good idea after all.

4. Trying to get support for a relatively simple problem on my laptop required several phone calls to different people who all kept pointing at other people, until after a month of waiting, and numerous requests to our local IT support manager, somebody looked at my laptop with NetMeeting and fixed the problem in 10 minutes.

Your thoughts?

- On the receiving end

Dear Receiver ...

Not having been involved in the process, it wouldn't be fair for me to comment on either the wisdom of the decision or the implementation plan. Some thoughts:

First and foremost, give central IT a chance. Even if the decision was brilliant and the plan was good, this wouldn't be the first time that launching a new business process resulted in some rough spots. A bad launch doesn't prove the concept is wrong.

If centralization wasn't accompanied by a staff reduction, a number of possibilities occur to me. They are: