According to this Legal Technology article, it could be.

Sometimes the cutting remark can blunt the cutting edge. Every year firms spend millions of dollars on hardware and software, but when we asked third-, fourth- and fifth-year associates about their firm’s technology as part of our annual midlevel job satisfaction survey (August 2008), we heard a lot more about long waits and condescending IT staffers than we did about innovative products. Specifically, we found, the quality of tech support — the size and organization of the help desk, and the responsiveness and attitude of its employees — often was the make-or-break factor in respondents’ opinion of their firm’s IT efforts.

I saw this first hand a number of years ago. Not specifically with a help desk, but I saw how a crummy attitude, and an unhelpful support person can ruin a tech project. I came in to an organization that had a fairly complex, yet very useful database system. Unfortunately, hardly anyone ever used it for anything outside of it’s main membership function. It had meeting planning, and subscription modules, and no one used them. When I suggested using them to some folks, I was met with fierce resistance, and came to the realization that everyone in this small organization simply hated this database, and I couldn’t really figure out why. I made an effort to educate people on the benefits, help them learn how it worked, etc. and nothing helped. Everyone still hated it.

It was only a couple of years into this job that I learned the reason why. Apparently, when they purchased this software, the software company sent a trainer to work with all of the staff. This person was not especially helpful to new users, had no patience for questions, did not do a good job training, and just generally wasn’t very nice. Everyone hated her, ergo, everyone hated the product.

I’ve continued to see the same thing play out over and over again. If your tech support folks convey a bad attitude when it comes to questions about your IT efforts, it will influence how people view the projects thesmelves.

Have you seen this play out in your own workplaces? Share your stories!

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They have topics for all sorts of computer security and forensics tasks. Here are just a few!

 

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Over the past several months, I have to say that I’ve been pretty darn lucky. It started out where after having worked in the IT department for most all of my professional career that my job was going away, a victim to outsourcing. I pretty much expected it when we were first acquired by “Giant Corp” — it was just a matter of when.

Fortunately for me, I was able to cash in on my podcasting experience and parlay a position within our User Education department. My IT skills, coupled with my podcasting experience, meant I was able to continue working at the same company with the same people I enjoyed working with but just doing something else — something that was equally, if not more, exciting than what I’d been doing for so many years before.

They today, lady luck was on my side yet again. Upon making my move in to the User Ed department at work, I’ve been working on my eLearning certificate from the University of Washington. During that time, I’ve kept a blog (off and on) of my endeavor. During these last few months I’ve been working with all sorts of eLearning software — one piece of software I’ve become very fond of, but unable to convince my boss to purchase a copy.

Well… this evening, my blog was stumbled upon by an individual from the company who makes the piece of software that I am so fond of and asked me if I was interested in participating in an upcoming beta of their product.

So, you just never know… There’s a good chance what you blog about or podcast about may work in your favor at some time in the future. A new job position or a chance to play with some cool software, you just never know.