Information Systems—AWOL
By Bobby Bock
President of Central Florida Branch 406
The Postal Service has spent an enormous amount of money on scanning and information systems infrastructure to provide the visibility our customers expect from a 21st century delivery company. For those of us who have to use our postal information systems, we use a browser to get in the Blue page.
In theory, all our programs are great; but, in practice, they fall short of what we really need to do our jobs. There isn’t enough bandwidth to support the applications we use daily. When you log on to input data or retrieve information, the system is always buffering, wasting valuable time.
When you can’t get a system to work, then comes the next charade—calling the Help Desk. When you finally reach a live person, they really want to help you solve your problem. It’s just that there aren’t enough of them to help. Years ago, I asked then-Postmaster General Megan Brennan about the shortcomings of the Help Desk. Her idea was to institute a call-back system so the Help Desk could call you in queue.
The only problem with this solution is when the Help Desk calls you back, you may not be sitting at the phone waiting for the call. If you miss the call back, you have to start the process all over again.
When we respond to the question in Postal Pulse regarding whether or not we have the tools we need to do our job, I wonder how many of us respond regarding the IT shortcomings. We need to improve how we navigate the information super-highway. The Postal Service should commit to help us in the field with our bandwidth issues so we can do our jobs effectively and efficiently.
On behalf of all our members who have to use information systems on a daily basis, we need the system to provide better reliability so we don’t need the Help Desk.
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