Ciao!: Bad OIT

Bad OIT

06.01.2005

Ah, comment spam. How I didn't miss you.

Also, yesterday & today were an excruciating experience w/ Western's OIT. See, they're transferring their email servers (and going to IMAP, btw). How would you handle this? Would you set up a system where students & faculty log in w/ their username & password (perhaps even a third piece of ID like a SSN or the fancy new student ID number), have them press a "transfer" button, then load a page of instructions for reconfiguring email client software?

If you answered "yes" you were wrong.

See, the best way for a university w/ a budget crisis to do this, is to require students & faculty (that's between 30-40 thousand) to telephone the help desk — w/ no information on which touchtone menu to select — and verbally give that info to an operator. And then wait a day for some other operator to call, and walk you through a client software reconfiguration, orally. It's 1987 all over again.

I figure that a low end figure of 20,000 people doing this, requiring an average of 10 minutes on the phone total (w/ both operators) would require 200,000 minutes, or 33,333 man hours. At $5/hour, that comes to a low estimate of $166,666.67. But I'm guessing it was well over the quarter million dollar mark.

But what do I care. I've a bag of left-over fresh cilantro, some eggs, a block of Amish Münster cheese, and sun-dried tomato pesto. And they're just begging to be eaten.

Posted by Miguel at 09:56 PM

Comments

I just transferred to Western, and I had a really similar problem when registering. All students need a WMU ID to register for classes, but in order to get an ID you must first be enrolled in at least one class. Obviously, this is a problem for all transfer students and incoming freshmen, so in a fairly monumental act in what seems to be a general policy of inefficiency, the administration solved the registration problem by just giving out the phone number to the registrar's office, through which everyone not allowed access to the new web system is now registering for their incoming semester.

Posted by: sara at June 2, 2005 02:28 AM

Yes, I think that going all web is a bad idea. There should be a paper-based back up system always in place. First, because sometimes it's actually quicker or more convenient for some people. But, more importantly, for these kinds of special circumstances. Not to mention, that some people (e.g. the blind) would have a hard time using an all-visual web-based system.

Also, if the university is going to go "all digital all the time" on us, why not at least do it right? I mean, the bureaucrats in Brazil (the movie) all had computers, but it was just Kafkaesque!

Posted by: Miguel at June 2, 2005 02:39 AM