Outsourced IT support at GM Germany

"Narrow minded nitwit" -- Attribute describing the writer of this post.

It had to be said.

With this out of the way, the author can go back to a great example of good companies gone bad.

One of the less satisfying aspects of being a small time consumer is that some ethically challenged companies are so big and have their sticky fingers in many sectors.

Voting with your wallet may work for a consumer company, but what about an 'enterprise' division?

A post on this blog deplored the old concept of 'Sippenhaft' - collective punishment - but it is hard to resist when a corporation is concerned.  It has to do, of course, with the feeling of impotence and powerlessness.

So, this nitwit writer swallowed his pride and did a quiet 'vote with your wallet' on Hewlett Packard to the tune of about 1500 dollars. That's the amount diverted from HP in the last six months because of the inherent evilness of gouging customers for printer ink.

Check our new year's resolution if you want to feel righteous. Or if you want to confirm that the nitwit attribute really applies to the author of the current post.

So, it is not completely without sadness that we read about HP shuttering the IT support at the largest GM plant in Germany.

Having seen what corporate ink wizards can do, we can speculate about how they do IT support levels 1 through 3.

Let's have a go at it. And if you work at HP, drop us a mail to congratulate us or to tell us why we are dead wrong. If we believe you, we'll publish your rebuttal.

Level 1: Fresh graduates with no more than 4 to 6 weeks of client training. Based in a notorious low wage country like India or China, they are little more than telephone wallas and whatever the Chinese call that.
Turnover about 80% per year.

Level 2: Folks with a year or two of experience in a medium wage country. Ireland comes to mind first. They pick up where the telephone wallas' standard remedy of "turn off your computer and turn it back on" fails.
Turnover in the order of 40 to 50 percent.

Level 3: The pros. Called by the Level 2 guys. Level 3 people are the specialists who will show up at the client's office or server room and fix the problem.
When we talk about a plant like that GM plant, it is reasonable to assume that the Level 3 folks are housed on the same grounds as the client, no more than a few hundred yards from any computer that prompted the call to the Level 1 folks.

We have heard first hand how IT support at GM worked but won't go into detail because the person who told us did so under the "you won't believe it" banner. 

We wish you ethics and self-confident customers.