The automation of user services in the coming information age

There are a number of signs and symptoms, harbingers and prophecies that the age of information as the rich resource is very near. Rapid advances in data transport technology, the advanced computational ability of desktop hardware, and the near ubiquity of network access at our workstations in the office or at home bring new opportunities, new challenges, and most importantly, a very large community of new users to the information exchange activity that is becoming the major use of computers and networks.

In the film, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, a submarine from the USSR is accidentally beached near a small East Coast sea town. The confrontation between the American people in the village and the Russian navy personnel serves as a study of growing to understand both the differences and the needs of citizens of two very different countries — the exchange of information becomes a crucial part of getting to know each other, and getting to understand and help each other. In our world of computing where it is often difficult to impossible to hook together devices from different manufacturers, we have “realms” like BITNET, uucp, the Internet, et al., where interoperation is a skill at best too arduous for casual or novice users. Recently, however, changes in network technology, administrative policy and procedures, and most importantly, the integration of technologies in accordance with “Open Systems” architectures and philosophies makes for effective and efficient communication among people on a wide variety of computing equipment.

Before the microcomputer, networking, and academic socioeconomic changes of the Eighties, users of computing systems tended to be highly skilled in computer programming, and in understanding technical literature on computing; they also asked highly technical questions of the campus computing center people. With the ability to do work at one's desktop, first as a terminal connected via a network to the local mainframe, and eventually to the situation where office and classroom microcomputer workstations are so ubiquitous as to open up a wide range of machine-mediated services to students, faculty, and staff from all disciplines, suddenly the “typical user” is no longer necessarily adept at traditional computing, or a myriad of other services that a workstation-intensive environment is capable of. In our world of computing and of computer networking there now exists not much difference between “users” and those who assist “users” in their networking endeavors. This is quickly changing and we need to understand the differences and needs of our communities of users of campus and organization networks.

User Services is adapting to this, and is in a period of rapid changes, as users of campus computing facilities grow by leaps and bounds, and the connectivity from the campus to the rest of the computing world begins to happen on campuses. No longer can User Service departments rely on old User Service technology, or on strategies that pose human-to-human interaction as a primary vehicle for service.

The challenges that we in User Services face in supporting large populations of users who are primarily interested in information rather than data can be summarized in a few words: “there will be many, many more of them than of us!” In my view, the most expedient way to provide quality and continuity of traditional services is to move directly toward the automation and standardization of these services.