Comment Re:Kill!!! (Score 1) 855
I don't disagree that desktop support and network support are vastly different things, nor do I disagree that the IT staff should NOT be doing this stuff, simply because desktop stuff is a teaching / training issue more than anything else (until you get to hardcore automation stuff where the coding skills of the IT staff start to come into play).
But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there. That's just the way the universe works, and they look like sulky and spoiled children if they refuse to accept responsibility for supporting what they shoved down everyone else's throats. That's how it plays to the rest of the world.
But there seems to be a lack of common sense involved that goes beyond even that...
There's this story: Our corporate office sent out a piece of financial reporting software we were required to use for planning and reporting. We had to install it on our computers. Now this was some years ago, pre-XP, whether it was win95 or 98 I can't remember, anyway, I dug into the documentation corporate provided, figured out what was needed, including edits to sys.ini and autoexec.bat and got up and running. There are 5 other people in the accounting department who needed this software, none of them remotely as computer sophisticated as I am, and I don't claim to be very sophisticated at all. I wrote up a HOWTO and walked it over to the IT department and explained that I expected that they didn't want everyone messing around with system configuration files, and here you go, these are the other folks who need installs....
"We don't support user applications," I was told. Well, I explained, I'm an accountant, and installing software and configuring system files isn't my job, either. So I'll pass this along to my colleagues and let them figure it out for themselves, too.
Phone started ringing off the hook in IT about 20 minutes later.