I.T. Support and Breaking the OODA Loop

“Hello, this is tech support.  You opened a trouble ticket stating that you had an error message and needed some assistance.  Can you elaborate?”
“Yes, it’s broken!”
“What’s broken?  Can you tell me what the error message said?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What program were you working in?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Is everything working now?”
“Maybe.  I don’t know.”

Does this exchange sound familiar to you?  If you’ve spent any time in I.T., then it should.  Every day, thousands of I.T. support professionals have to field service calls from users who are extremely intelligent in all other areas of their life, but when sitting in front of a computer they can’t seem to grok the magic screen in front of them.  These are people who spend hours a day in front of a keyboard, who have as one of the primary tools of their job one of those mystical computers that only the “gurus” can seem to figure out.

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