On IT Consultants
On occasion, we get calls to the helpdesk which fall outside what we're capable of supporting. It's not that we're uncaring, but some issues simply can't be solved over the phone and/or go outside our expertise. Some of these are accounting related, but the majority are IT-related. When we hear that a database is getting damaged repeatedly, a user can't print, or access to the database is slow, it usually means IT is going to have to get involved.
Telling a user that they've got an IT-related issue is usually received like bad medical test results. Next we usually hear the four of the five stages of grief (almost never acceptance). Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. It doesn't need to be this way, but for some reason, almost always is. But why? Is dealing with IT that bad? Are we that inaccessible? So difficult to deal with? Are we really this guy?
The toughest cases are those where the company does not have formal IT staff (we talk to a lot of art director/IT guys) or worse, an outside consultant. We've used outside consultants here at C&P for various projects over the years (with varying levels of success), so we understand your pain. High hourly rates, blame-placing, vendor favoritism, and general zealotry come with the territory. But since they're often more cost-effective than learning the needed skill ourselves, we stick with them, as do many creative shops.
Bob Cringely recently wrote a great article about this here. His list of the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants at the end of the article is particularly good.
Now we know that there are some great IT consultants out there; we'd like to know more of them! Often agencies ask us for referrals and we don't have too many. We have a good network of C&P consultants to help with training and custom work, but very few who can handle the tech side as well. So we're looking for your help here. If you have a particularly good IT consultant, please let us know about it and we'll see about putting them on the website. You'll do your consultant a favor as well as your fellow C&P users.
