Email from the service desk today:

Please contact Service Desk to verify that your Outlook is compatible with Exchange 2013

This is almost a perfect example of non-user-centered process design.

Note that I'm not calling out our corporate IT department; they do some great work on the back-end systems, and individual members of IT are very helpful on internal message boards and such. It's just some of their processes that are a bit backwards.

Most IT departments work like this, with the user interaction as a bit of an afterthought. Training people won't work, because anyone who is good at both IT and people will quickly migrate out of a service desk role. The solution can only be to automate as much as possible and make IT invisible to end users.

For instance, in my case, they know what version of Outlook I use from the server logs. They also know whether that version is compatible with Exchange 2013. Also, as of this writing Outlook 2011 is the latest version available for Mac, so it's not as if they could upgrade me or something. Why, then, even ask me to contact them?

So what did I do? After scratching my head for a moment, I forwarded the email back to the service desk, adding:

Can you please verify compatibility? I am on Outlook for Mac 2011, version 14.4.5.

Let's see what they say.