I finally watched The Matrix last week. It’s a thought-provoking movie that asks three disturbing questions:

1. Does anyone call what Keanu Reeves does “acting”?

2. Has there ever been a stupider premise than the human body as the ideal source of electrical energy?

3. Does Moore’s Law make the movie’s basic premise inevitable?

We’ll leave the first two questions to Roger Ebert. Before we dig into the third …

Last month I asked what you envisioned as the center of your network, the mainframe or the PC. In other words, is the point of your network to connect terminal devices to the systems that drive them, or is it to connect employees to the resources they need to do their jobs?

The e-mail and forum exchanges on this question surprised me. Most unexpected was that nobody proposed putting processes in the center, even though the process view of the enterprise dominates consulting circles these days. The correspondents who proposed an “acentric” perspective also caught me off-guard, since to me acentrism means no design focus.

What bothered me the most, though, was how many respondents told me the enterprise “never stopped running on the mainframe.” This contingent disputed my assertion that a company’s work is performed by individual human beings, and that companies succeed or fail one person at a time.

On reflection, this isn’t a question of who is right – the question is which perspective is the most useful. With the mainframe in the middle you’d divide work into three categories: Data preparation, where people and feeder systems massage data into processable formats; The Work, which is what host applications do; and exception-handling, which is what people do with system outputs (since the system does The Work, it only reports the exceptions it can’t handle).

With Process in the middle, both humans and information systems fulfill roles in the company’s core processes, performing well-defined tasks that transform inputs into outputs.

Both of these perspectives can be useful. I’ve designed and implemented quite a few successful applications based on the systems-centric view myself, and as mentioned, the process-centric perspective currently dominates business design.

When you put the employee in the middle, though, several good things happen. First, you reduce overhead. Every time one employee hands work to another, entropy happens – work goes into managing the transfer of work rather than getting the work itself done. With a human-centered view you’ll organize resources so work stays on a single desk until it’s done.

Second, customer relationships will improve. When one human being owns each piece of work, the company has a chance of looking less like an impersonal machine that answers all requests with, “We can’t do that – it violates our procedures.”

To understand the third benefit, let’s revisit the basic idea behind The Matrix – that eventually we’ll all be slaves to one or more artificial intelligences. Just thirty years into the future, Moore’s Law will have clicked over twenty times, so computers will be one million times more powerful than they are today. One million.

No matter what the cognitive task, computers will be better at it than you are, so if the mainframe is in the middle, you’ll be working for it. Likewise for process-centered work – computers, being far more capable than humans, will do all the interesting stuff. (In the movie version, we’ll do nothing but cheap manual labor. Fortunately, Microsoft will have written the operating system and our heroes will take back the world when the blue screen of death happens.)

If humans are in the middle, we may have a cable going into our skulls (although I sure hope wireless technology has progressed more by then) but it will be to augment our abilities, not to boss us around.

Okay, this is the stuff of a summer movie, and your choices today will neither save nor destroy the world two decades from now. My point is to illustrate the third benefit of putting humans in the middle of your system designs – you’ll help make your company a better place to work.

If you missed the news, the population just hit 6 billion.

That’s a lot of people. If we were all to lie down end-to-end on the ground, we would go around the earth about 2,600 times. If someone put us all in a swimming pool, packed tightly together like sardines or flying in coach-class, the pool would have to measure more than a quarter of a mile on each side.

Then there’s the Y3K problem: We’ll just about outweigh the earth itself by the year 3000. It’s enough to make you believe there are limits to growth.

Amazingly, with all these people to choose from, many IS hiring managers can’t find enough qualified applicants to fill their open positions.

We can’t solve everything at once, so today we’re going to focus on just one small part of the problem: the help desk.

For many of those running IS, the help desk is an afterthought. It isn’t strategic, executives don’t interact with it very much (and when they do they get special treatment), and it generates no measurable return on investment.

Let’s recalibrate. The level of trust and respect between IS and the rest of the business is pretty low these days. (I base this on a large volume of anecdotal evidence, not formal surveys; your mileage may vary.) Your help desk is, or at least should be, the most frequent point of contact between your organization and the employees whose trust and respect you need every time you implement new technology.

The first step in making sure your help desk increases that trust and respect is staffing it with people who can actually solve problems instead of simply dispatching a trouble ticket to a technician.

Except … Bob, you idiot! Haven’t you heard there’s an IT labor crunch? If we do find people like this, we have more important places to use them.

News flash: You don’t need computer science majors on the help desk. Chances are, they wouldn’t be able to figure out that the end-user has a notebook resting on one of the cursor keys anyway. Here’s who you do need on your help desk:

  • High school seniors: Sure, you’ll only get them for a few hours a day during the school year (more during the summer, of course). But who better to diagnose PC problems than someone who assembled a high-end gaming system from spare parts? You can pay a lot more than the local Taco Bell and still save a ton compared to those computer scientists you can’t find anyway.
  • College students: Yes, you’ll have to work around class schedules, and you’ll have to pay more than you would pay a high school student. Here’s the upside: You get highly qualified help desk analysts, still at low cost, and they’re all potential recruits when they graduate. After a year, you’ll know who you’re going to want to hire – offer them scholarships in exchange for two years as full-time employees when they leave college.
  • Internal PC mentors: These are the people employees call when they need help because they’ll solve the problem before your help desk would have finished writing up the trouble ticket. They’re already employees, they’ve already proven they can do the job, and many of them would love an opportunity to move into IS.
  • IS analysts: Rotate your analysts through stints on the help desk. Here’s what they’ll gain: humility (as they find out just how much they don’t know how to fix and how knowledgeable and sophisticated those dumb end-users really are); listening skills (because to fix problems they have to hear beyond the symptom to what’s really going on); a better understanding of how work gets done (they’ll see it first-hand); and, most important of all … they’ll learn what the rest of the company thinks of IS.

Staffing shortage? When it comes to the help desk, at least, we don’t suffer from a staffing shortage. All we suffer from is a lack of imagination.