Page 104 - Lakeland Catholic Technology Plan

9. File Servers and Services.
Another area that has met with outstanding success in the District is the standardi- zation on Novell servers in each school. Each school has an identical Novell server, with the same software. Thus a user can move from school to school and be familiar with the software, and access to the server. This is also a dream for technical support staff in that they can focus their energy and expertise on a single server platform. Very well done.
Note: There is a caveat, see the Mac OS section in Hardware Section.
10. Technical Support
By far, the most stressed area identified during our interviews and observations was the technical support area. This is one of the difficult areas to manage and maintain a good balance of service to schools, and service to computers.
The technical support staff are very knowledgeable, they have much experience in computers and they have a vision with how computers should be used. With a little fine-tuning, these staff can provide outstanding contributions to the District Technology Plan initiatives.
First, a little background may be useful to understand the present. Until May 1998, the District did not have any technology technical support personnel on staff, all technical work was contracted out. In May 1998, the first was hired to provide technical support. This technician soon became overwhelmed, and in June 1999, a second technician was hired to help. This brought the technical support staff to two full time positions, to take care of 400 computers, servers, the wide area net- work, and local area network.
To go a little further, the District essentially has four people in their Technology Services Department. The staff includes Mike Cachia, the Director of Technology Services, Phil Switzer, the Instructional Program Coordinator — Educational Technology and two computer technicians, Scott Berard and Dory Trekofski. Phil is responsible for all staff training on the use of technology. Mike is responsible for the Student Records System (SASI), visioning, planning, and technical support (Scott and Dory). As discussed earlier in this paper, Mike is spending an extraordi- nary amount of time on the SASI system, and very little time is available for other projects. Scott and Dory, currently are responsible for ensuring all the computer labs are setup and functioning, all the servers are upgraded, all the software is installed and running, the new e-mail server, and other projects as assigned by Mike. All wiring is done by a contracted electrician, although sometimes the technicians must spend time cleaning this up.
To provide technical support and services to the schools, Mike has setup a School visit schedule. Dory spends his time exclusively on the schedule, and doing work in schools. Scott has the freedom to choose which projects are important, and where he should be spending his time. However, when Mike, Dory, and Scott were interviewed separately, they all had different priorities. For Mike, the E-Mail System and the WAN were at the top of his list. Scott’s list topped with upgrading the Novell Servers, and getting computers setup in the schools, while Dory’s was a mixture of the two. Additionally, when asked, all agreed that they met very infre- quently, in fact many times as little as once per month, only briefly. Also, due to the location of the technicians, they are “out of sight and out of mind” for Mike.
Providing technical support to schools and staff should be the highest priority of the technicians. However, many of the schools we visited, contained many exam- ples of:
•computers not being connected yet;
•software not installed;
•computers being removed without letting the school know;arbitrarily deciding who would get the next service;
•computers left disconnected and non-functional in classrooms; little communica- tion on school priorities
•computers away for lengthy periods of time to repair; and
•hard drives removed from computers, and not replaced for weeks or months and documents stored on hard drives were erased, and no care was taken to provide for safe moving of documents or recovery.
The most important skill of a technical support person is not how well they use computers, or how well they fix computers, or their level of knowledge with re- spect to technology. The most important skill is customer service. They must be able to talk at each users level, they must be friendly, professional, cordial, and work in a manner that automatically generates respect for themselves. Their very conduct and dress must be appealing, and staff should look forward to working with them.
This is not the case in the District. In visiting the schools and the Educational Technology department, we observed many useful computers and parts sitting on shelves, not being used, or planned to be used. No schools complained that they had too many computers, and as such, any and all useful computers should be allocated and used inside schools. The District has done an excellent job of providing equipment, training, and working space for the technical support team. They have one of the largest facilities, in our experience, of any school jurisdiction for setup/repair/training, etc. They have as much freedom as they want, they have much control.
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