Changing user populations

ABSTRACT

Computing services in the form of assistance to users was first established in colleges and universities to assist professors and graduate students in writing computer programs usually in Fortran and usually to solve scientific problems. These services evolved to include non-programmers—those who were using a higher level, non-procedural language usually to solve engineering problems and social science statistical problems. As software has improved to serve a wider audience of computer users, the typical user services have expanded.

Today user services addresses the needs of many people using computers to manipulate words. Services have changed to include micro or personal computers as well as mainframes. Many customers are not doing research but are merely trying to solve problems of office or personal drudgery. Administrators who are querying and preparing reports are now among our customers. Many of our customers of ten and twenty years ago are now very self-sufficient users who have incorporated computing into the curriculum and have produced computer-savvy younger faculty who are performing very sophisticated research using computers extensively themselves in the laboratory for data acquisition. These faculty are now gathering data faster than the central mainframe can process and reduce that data. Thus the character of research has changed in one generation.

These changes in user populations have enormous impact for people working in computing centers providing user services. The technical level of our staff must be greater than it was ten years ago. The sophisticated researcher needs much more help than merely helping him to debug a computational Fortan program. His problems involve data acquisition in real-time, storing and sending that data, and processing it in larger and larger arrays. All users from the researcher to the novice with a simple personal computer have data communication needs and problems which are often not trivial to resolve. Administrators have problems which are often very complex and require a combination of knowledge of data base, communications, query languages, report writers, and programming not usually found in the traditional user services staffs. Graphical output is becoming a common requirement and as experience of our users increases, the simple is not sufficient. Word applications are becoming more common than numerical applications requiring a different kind of staff expertise. As the computer becomes a common tool for all students, faculty, and administrators, the skills and tasks required for user services are changing. Unless we are ready to provide the requisite services, our value to our institutions will diminish and pass away.

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Project and people management