Letter to the editor

Salaries and systems are the fuel of the fed. We hype the value of our human resources and fight the budget battles to provide them the best technology has to offer. Yet, we often fall far short in providing them the safety net of top-quality support when systems sputter, software hiccups, or fingers fumble on keyboards.

The results are expensive lost productivity, failure to exploit the full capabilities and benefits of new technology, prolonged critical outages, employee frustration and degradation of our services to the public.

There's a huge body of knowledge in the customer support industry and the private sector leads us by about 10 years in embracing it because business leaders were the first to recognize the impact that top internal technical support has on the "bottom line."

Today we're under mandates from Congress to match the best in industry in how we serve taxpayers, which is our new "bottom line." Meeting those mandates will require a responsive internal infrastructure of help desks and other customer technical support which ensures that those on the front lines are at their highest effectiveness and productivity.

It's time to place internal emphasis on this key part of our infrastructure and get it uniformly aligned with accepted best practices of the customer support industry.

Daryl Covey NEXRAD Radar Operations Center