The way we were: twenty-five years of end user computing support in higher education

ABSTRACT

This is a brief survey of the methods, challenges, and success stories of end user computing support services in colleges and universities for the past 25 years. Calling upon the papers and presentations of the proceedings of the annual ACM SIGUCCS User Services Conference, along with the personal experiences of the author, this paper identifies the common trends and special circumstances of end user computing support in colleges and universities since the late 1970's. Many things have changed, others have not. Support for distributed computing has been a regular concern, as has the recruitment, retention and training of staff. Another perennial topic is the understandable concern about stress and the avoidance of burnout. At least a dozen papers in the proceedings deal with this latter issue. Of particular importance, is the care and feeding of student assistants; this has been an ever-present issue on the minds of user services managers. The evolution of mainframe to micro to personal to networked computing is also a very evident theme through the time period, and of course, the support issues surrounding international networking and the World Wide Web has dominated the past seven years.The survey provides an interesting, and at times amusing, retrospective view of how far we have come and how many times we have been consumed by the newest technology or the latest user demand. Although it can only be measured subjectively, I conclude that end user support has generally improved quite a bit through the years in spite of the rapid evolution of technology and the incredible increase in the number and diversity of end users.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.2 HISTORY OF COMPUTING
      Subjects: People

General Terms:
Management

Keywords:
history, management, services, support, users