Reprinted from TheDailyWTF.com:
At my company, there’s a bit of a wall between Application Development and Network Operations. All “network and network-service related issues” must be reported through the porthole, a.k.a. Helpdesk. Quite often, this leads to interesting results.
“Helpdesk, Jerry speaking.”
“Hey Jerry,” I said, “this is Paul over in app dev. Our TerraTrade system has a defective ForEx feed that needs to be fixed right away. It’s causing a bit of an outage, so if possible, can we open the ticket as ‘Urgent’?”
“Not a problem,” Jerry responded, “let me just have your name and number, and we’ll take care of it.”
I gave him a few more details and felt pretty happy that helpdesk was actually helpful. Five minutes after I hung up, an email message came in:
[URGENT] TICKET #71248 HAS BEEN ASSIGNED TO YOU
Not a moment later, my phone rang. I hesitantly picked it up.
“Hello is this Paul,” the caller asked before I could even say Hello. I affirmed that it was me.
“Paul,” he said, “this is Steve over at help desk. We’ve got an Urgent trouble ticket that just came in. It’s for a, uh, Fortix feed defect. We just wanted to make sure you’re on it?”
It took me a few minutes to explain to Steve that he was, in fact, assigning me the defect I had just reported.
Before you laugh too hard at the above story – it’s not that far removed from what many IT departments do daily – play the blame game. The user calls a problem into the help desk, then assigns it to the network. The network calls the helpdesk to tell them that it’s a problem with the server, and the server team calls the help desk to tell them it’s the application. If you’re lucky, someone along that chain will know how to fix the problem, but even if you are lucky, it’s still a lot of wasted time and energy.
This line from Manish Chacko’s article, “God Help the Help Desk” sums it up:
Imagine a man walking into a hospital, saying that he doesn’t feel good, and doctors around the country are immediately called in, starting with the cardiologist, who rules out heart trouble. The man is next wheeled to a podiatrist, who rules out any problems with his feet. He’s then wheeled to a gynecologist (But I’m a man… Ma’am, I’m a doctor. I think I should make that determination – and only after the tests come back.) If your diagnostic process is trial by error, you’re not, technically, diagnosing.
This is why Dr. Jim Metzler recommended time and time again that application development and network operations merge into a single “application delivery” team. The primary job of IT is to deliver an application. Focusing on the performance your single group misses the point – it’s how the applications perform that is most important, and hardware, software, and networking are all part of that performance equation.
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