What have you done for IT lately?

Delivering the kind of proactive IT that businesses need means looking at recent and long-standing problems, and suggesting fixes.  Richmond Systems says we should consider rethinking whether bottlenecks occur because of user-error or technology failures.


When something goes wrong in business, do we blame users, the technology, or both?  It’s a question which all helpdesks must face because the answer defines the type of services and level of support which must be delivered.

As an example of inappropriately dishing out blame, we recently saw a study from On Direct which says half of business leaders believe that a ‘serious mistake’ regarding email attachments would cause major damage to their organisations.  Even more dramatically, eight per cent of organisations claim to have already lost a client or sales because of errors with email attachments.

Unsurprisingly given the research was conducted by a cloud software provider, the report recommends that cloud can be used to safeguard against the expensive errors that email can cause.  The problem here is that sending the wrong email attachments is not a technology failure, it’s a human one.  If, as eight per cent claim, business has been lost because an inappropriate attachment has been sent by mistake, the same error could occur if the guilty party used a cloud-based dropbox-style service.

This conclusion doesn’t mean the research is without merit however.  The research also highlights problems that do have a real bearing on technology.  For example, users attempting to send files that are too large not only clog up networks, they cause delays which could hold up or even halt deals going through.  Similarly, the increasing problem of attachments not working on mobile devices could prove problematic if the recipient is accustomed to taking action while on the move.

Technology planning can help fix both of these problems.  Cloud could certainly help, but there are other solutions which may be even simpler, such as an automatic reply to any emails that exceed a certain size.  If we return to our email attachment problem, which seems unsolvable because of the human error element, could a process be created which protects against this?  Would it be difficult to write a rule which pings an email to the sender of an email using the word ‘attachment’ that didn’t have an attachment included?

The point is that IT, just like every business department, is under pressure to deliver value and justify budgets.  It’s no longer enough to be on stand by to fix a faulty PC, service desks today need to be exploring common problems and suggesting solutions.  The idea of automatically pinging each email mentioning attachments may prove to be unworkable and counter-productive, but it’s the kind of challenge that once overcome, could prove hugely valuable to the business.  More importantly, it is the kind of niggling issue that is easily solvable with some simple thought and application.

Learn more about how Richmond Systems can help you tackle your IT support challenges.