I was talking to a colleague the other day and he mentioned how difficult it was to get IT Support in their unit.

He said that their IT Support technician was always busy sorting problems out for the students and fixing other machines so he was rarely able to help staff with their issues.

I was intrigued, as ‘sorting student problems out and fixing machines’ sounds quite a lot like reasonable duties for a technician’s ‘IT Support’ to me, so I asked for an example.

“Well, the other day somebody was showing me their Word Document and it had an Excel Pie chart in it. We discussed changing a couple of parameters in the statistics and so he opened up the Excel sheet, changed the details and the chart in the Word Document updated automatically! That seemed really useful to me so I emailed our chap to ask him to help with setting something like that up. I’ve not heard anything back from him yet and it’s been two weeks!”

Now, whilst this has an element of IT in it and would, indeed, provide support to the story’s main protagonist, I don’t believe that this is what most IT Staff feel is their main remit for ‘IT Support’!

However…

What if this is what a sizable amount of non-IT Staff feel *is* what is meant by ‘IT support’? i.e. if they’re asked the question “How good is your IT Support?” they answer “Not great”. Not because the IT Support is actually lacking but more because they don’t know that their definition of ‘IT Support’ is more to do with their own Digital Literacy and less to do with what their IT Support staff actually have as their main role.

If we’re trying to fix a gap in provision of IT Service we should always identify the true definition of the problem rather than blindly assume that we’re all thinking the same thing for the same terms.