An open letter to the CVTC Board

You have unwittingly fallen into a HUGE trap. Sungard has currently only 6 local employees. Nearly everyone else is located outside the state. Even if they were paid at an average of $100,000 each, that leaves 1.4 million leaving the district each year. Since Sungard Collegis came here we have lost about 23 IT professionals. Right now we will have only one person on staff who can respond to hardware or software problems.

I realize that they are touting the “new” Citrix as the salvation of why they do not need any staff. Citrix will work for many, but by no means all, of our teaching software. It will not work well with our Business Enterprise software or Banner. It does not work at all with software like AutoCad.

Adam Stavn was right when he reported about the survey of helpdesk users. Students thought that they were fine. Faculty thought that they were so-so. Staff thought that they were only fair to poor. These numbers are probably very accurate and not at all slanted. Here is why.

As the former helpdesk person for nearly a year, I have a very good understanding of how the process works. I know how each call is handled and how it is rated for attention.

Students who call in usually have login issues which can easily be fixed from a call center. If they have other issues it is likely to be an issue with their ISP or internet service provider which is out of our control. The students are satisfied either way. They will only rebel when their classroom has issues. Without adequate staffing, that will be quite possible.

Faculties have issues with the technology or infrastructure. Often the piece of equipment that they need in order to teach is not functioning properly. Occasionally it is related to issues that can easily be fixed from a distance. While they may be somewhat satisfied to date that will change as the support that was just laid off will not be available for fall.

Staff is the one at the bottom of the call list. The procedure that is in place with Sungard Collegis is to make every call from the “front office” a very high priority. No matter if the question is one that needs attention sometime into the future it must be answered immediately, even if that means dropping something more pressing. When a staff person is waiting for someone to fix the infrastructure in order to do production it is not very comforting to know that you will have to call the helpdesk, explain for 20 minutes what the problem is, and then wait for hours or days for someone to arrive to correct the issue. Some issues have even been closed without resolution only to be opened again. Since we only have one person left with experience it will be even worse into the future.

Hiring new people will have little impact on this as they will not be part of solving these issues. Perhaps our “front office” will be also feeling the pinch, as they try to solve their own issues with balky equipment instead of having the immediate attention that they are used to.

The new positions which will be created will by necessity be simply a duplication of the work that our people did before. The difference will be in the amount of money that you will have to pay in order to get anyone to take the jobs. The pay scale, even locally, is much higher than what we pay our own people. It would have been a great saving to train our own people to bring them up to the “skill set” wanted instead of “hoping” to get someone at twice the price. The last job that was offered to get an “expert” for a lower wage has cost the college thousands more than having the past employee do the work.

Again, training has a lot of benefits to CVTC when our own employees have it. To date Sungard Collegis frequently sends their own employees to the training instead of our own people. If they walk out the door in the future CVTC will be the losers yet again.

Submitted by Linda Danzinger. Oh boy, We finally have a person using their name. We are moving in the right directon now folks. Thanks much Linda. You can have all the space you want.