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Analysis and Recommendations for Information Technology User Support Provided to a Government Field Office

Information technology users in government field offices require a user support program that addresses their needs for successful completion of job duties. Providing the necessary user support is a challenge for office management and the information technology staff. While this professional report focuses on information technology user support provided to a government office, many of the observations and lessons should apply to other organizations.

An assessment is made on the intended goals of the user support program for providing information system maintenance and documentation to the user of a selected government field office. A comparison is then made between the physical processes involved within the "ideal" information systems for user support with current information systems utilized by the organization. Based on the evaluation of the performance of the current information systems, recommendations for improving the information technology user support program at the government field office are presented.

Analysis and Recommendations for Information Technology User Support Provided to a Government Field Office

Chapter 4

Documentation for the User

Documentation as User Support

As mentioned earlier in this professional report, one of the key services of IT user support in the Organization is to provide documentation. The IT staff in the field office is required to provide user documentation for both installed applications and applications that are either locally developed or modified. The IT program is also responsible for providing and developing system operating manuals and application software user manuals. While the functions of user support through documentation have been specified by the Organization, the format and means for providing the documentation to the user have not been specified.

Because of the absence of standardized practices for managing the documentation in the field offices, most field office users have access to literally hundreds of documents in inconsistent formats utilizing many different methods for retrieving the documents. For example, users may have to go to the office intranet to retrieve the latest office computer usage policy. The user may then need to dust off a binder to retrieve a "hardcopy" of an e-mail containing instructions on how to reboot a system. Files that have been digitized are in various file formats such as ASCII text, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word Document, and Rich Text Format. A user manual for one application may be found by the user in a hardcopy "software binder", but a user manual for another application may only be available on a computer screen through the program's "Help" menu.