You are being naive Tom.
As a past major university computing specialist I can tell you that
isn't so.
University's for one thing are saddled with the "tenure" system that
originated in the middle ages. A lot of university management is
composed of burned out/ "tought out" tenured professors who have PLENTY
of brains" but no skills or training or relevant experience to manage
anything and particularly not unforgiving 24/7 IT assets and production.
Secondly, students for various reasons can only be used in minor roles
such as "help desk" or " low responsibility" server admin assistance
roles.
That is because they are mercurially temporary (as in semester to
semester), they are not allowed to work more than 20 hrs per week, they
don't show up reliably at exam, major assignment and holiday times, they
can't be given access to important passwords for a multitude of legal,
academic and security reasons and as a group they are one of the world
great sources of illicit computer gambits (as in asking the fox to guard
the henhouse!).
Academic computing is always a joke except for depts. where there are
major money/ profit streams involved.(Computing, research, Physics,
Engineering etc...) In those university areas, IT is staffed and run
along corporate lines.
db
Tom Piwowar wrote:
I probably have complained before about IT managers, but I am in a
special case. I belong to a major university in the DC area, and my
school has a small but deficient computer service facility that must
cope with a very small budget. After the IT director, there are only
inexperienced students to solve problems.
Lacking money and staff can be a problem, but a university should ebe
able to make up for this by using its best asset: brains. It looks like
your IT director is not doing that effectively and for that I would blame
the IT director for bad management skills.
The things you describe as broken are mostly standard services. The IT
director should have a few students who specialize in each of these
narrowly-defined areas. omeone can learn the basics of supporting Office
in a few hours. Same goes for setting up printers or scanners. The people
who do know can teach the ones who don't know. This is not hard.
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