quite an ostentatious title, I know. But if you will humor me…
Twice in the last 5 business days, I have discovered problems of which Central IT was not aware.
Last week, I passed along information that several law school staff and faculty received almost no e-mail over the weekend and that most had almost everything getting caught in the university’s spam filter. I was asked to test this, try that, change this setting…all along reminding IT that this was affecting multiple users and that changing one setting for one user was not a high-probability trouble-shooting path. Turns out that it was indeed a university-wide problem, and the notice went up on the IT web page about an hour later.
Today, one of our network printers was not working for some of our staff. We use a central printing system where everything goes from our computers to a print spooler then back out the network to the actual printer. So I start checking things, crawling around on the floor. Network connection – good. IP address – good. Power – good. Let’s go check the server online…whoops. Page won’t load. Call up IT. Am told that “sometimes the page just loads slowly but that doesn’t really mean anything” and that they’ll “look into it.”
Turns out that one of the two print managers/spoolers had crashed. Reboot of server, no problem.
The people here at SCU are good, and many are great. Everyone seems to want to find solutions. But sometimes it’s like the dots just don’t connect. Or, when they do, it’s like point A can ONLY go to point B. And when standing at point A, there is no point C. Point C does not exist. It is like Area 51 or something.
I can tell you this – I want to work with IT at SCU. I want my department to collaborate with them, to take advantage of rather than ignore the intersections that we have. But if we have to go to this much trouble even for things this minor, if we have to deal with these inefficiencies despite the good intentions of our colleagues, how much hope do we really have for taking our operations and programs to the next level?