The art and science of user services

ABSTRACT

We are all familiar with the great advances made over the years in all areas of science and technology resulting from the application of well known laws and principles. Among such laws are the laws of conservation of energy and mass, the laws of thermodynamics, and Newton's laws of motion.

We are frequently overwhelmed by the changes confronting us daily in our user services work. We experience changes in hardware, software, organizational structure, management, personnel, user education, consulting, documentation and physical facilities. The discipline of physics takes the whole universe of ubiquitous changes in stride and integrates them into unifying principles. In the midst of an ever-changing world, physics presupposes a constancy of nature, i.e. that identical conditions give identical results; that cause and effect relationships can be determined and applied to observed phenomena.

This paper will be a light-hearted trip in analogous thinking into a different perspective of the many changes we experience in our profession.

I shall explore how we might be able to use these classical laws of physics to ease our burden of coping with the changes we encounter daily. If our activities do obey these laws in a predictable and sensible fashion, then we can use these principles to help us. For example, the fundamental law of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. From this law we can deduce that for a given level of user services personnel staffing, a maximum amount of work (energy) can be accomplished over a given period of time. Hence, priorities are set, either implicitly or explicitly. By clearly seeing the situation, realistic goals and expectations are possible. Perhaps such phenomena as staff personnel burnout and high turnover rates might be diminished by seriously applying such techniques.

References

1. 1.Communication of the ACM, March 1982, Volume 25, Number 3, page 183.
2. 2."Causes of Turnover Among Data Processing Professionals—Some Preliminary Findings," Mohan R. Tanniru and Susan M. Taylor, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Computer Personal Research Conference, 1981, Association for Computing Machinery, p. 224.
3. 3.Synectics - The Development of Creative Capacity, William J. Gordon, Harper Brothers, New York, 1961.
4. 4.The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1956.
5. 5.Op.cit. Proceedings, etc., p. 286.
6. 6.Op.cit. Proceedings, etc., p. 323
7. 7.Theory Z, William G. Ouchi, Addison-Wesley, 1981.
8. 8."Learning a Lesson from the Japanese—Theory Z", Jack B. Rochester, Forecast '82, Computerworld, Vol. XVI, No. 1, Jan. 4, 1982, pages 83-88.

Index Terms

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems