Tracking enterprise technology transformation
Training is the key to success – can the vendors help me?
A National Skills Academy for IT, announced yesterday and due to open in 2009, will bring together an unprecedented, sector-wide collaboration of employers, educators and stakeholders to meet the skills needs of the IT workforce.
Information technology (IT) skills are critical to the growth of the UK economy. There are currently over a million IT professionals in the UK, with 141,000 new recruits needed every year. The IT industry is predicted to grow at five times the rate of the workforce as a whole and recent research suggests that optimising the ICT capabilities of the UK economy is worth as much as £35 billion a year.
Karen Price, Chief Executive of e-skills UK said: “e-skills UK is delighted to be working with employers across the sector to get the skills academy off the ground. It offers a unique opportunity for employers to take collective responsibility for the skills and accreditation of the IT workforce, with innovative development programmes and qualifications that are valued by the sector. I believe this will play a major role in helping the UK become a world leader in IT in the coming years.”
The more training we can provide to our end user community and our IT teams, the more we can improve the services we offer, align what we can deliver with the business need, to add value and illustrate IT’s enablement of the end user community.
I wonder if we could not see more from vendors?
Improvement in not only the training they can provide, but the product knowledge and accessibility of the end user to their support, their guidelines and best practice.
That I can easily access the information I need about a product, what firmware should be used with my products – “what happens when content….”. That I can type http://vendorname.com/support, type in the product name and be given instant information, drivers, the manuals etc.
We need to change vendors support sites, from one of designer layout, of structure and corporate branding to one around the end user need based on the way the user looks for information.
Could I one day have an engineers blog talking just about DL380s? That blog would issue firmware updates, recalls/announcments – why I want a DL380G4 not a Dl380G3 etc. An IBM guy talking about what he’s doing on a daily basis with his x3550 with links to content/articles, best practice, “when swapping a drive do this…”?
That on the Proliant 2500 blog, there might be an entry for the engineer that had to visit to fix a Compaq Proliant 2500 which had blue screened and all he did was upgrade the array controller firmware to fix it (Windows NT hotfix was the cause) . On the DL380 blog, that the back-plain had failed on another clients’ DL380 and that he could tell this because….(several hard drives all reported as failed, but when re-seated recovered, then started failing again). You ask any windows server guy who’s played with a vendor server platform, say a model name and hardware issue and I’m sure they’ll know a few quick steps to try – oh ASR, check the firmware, drivers and think about re-seating the memory….
True empowerment to the end user community. All realistically at low cost to the vendor (the engineers are dealing with these issues on a daily basis) but of great effect to the end user. 9 times out of 10 I have a five minute question, the kind of thing that could be blogged, could be answered and pre-written/responded to without needing to trouble an engineer directly, or providing product support information – serial number, model number etc.
Understanding that 70% of the users accessing vendor.com/drivers want drivers, displaying that information quickly and easily is key, everything else is secondary – thus the use of search engines to get the information I want. I can go to ‘vendor.com’, click support, click drivers, click product classifcation, click product line, click model, then click drivers again…
That information is displayed in product structure not platform, I know I have a DL380G3 or an IBM X3550, but as a new user, I might not know that comes under X series servers, or Proliant servers. The URL address, the experience with the site in terms of downloading the drivers and accessing the information can be just as significant to the end user experience as the equipment working. Could I not type http://www.ibm.com/x3550/drivers and be re-directed internally in the IBM site? Or http://www.hp.com/dl380g4?
The more we empower the right users with the right information, the more we can empower end users with experience of the platform, with empowerment to get their technology working for them, to avoid those “I bought blades from… and they were rubbish because….”.
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