People helping people: examining the relationship between the support provider and the support recipient in an IS environment

The support of computer users is one key issue facing organizations who wish to expand their use of computers. If organizations want to be effective, they must build a support structure that is able to adapt to the changing needs of the user community. It has been well documented that computer users seek the assistance of their colleagues before they seek the assistance of the IS professionals that have been placed in the company's Information Center. Researchers suggest many possible reasons for this. Chief among these is physical proximity and professional familiarity. This research examined other reasons why users sought the assistance of their colleagues before they sought the assistance of IS experts. A classification scheme was devised for coding the relationship between a Support Provider and a Support Recipient. It consists of nine attributes: Guidance, Knowledge, Personal Familiarity, Professional Familiarity, Assurance, Communication, Emotional Support, Peer Similarities and Proximity. Administrative Computer users at eight colleges were surveyed. They were asked to identify individuals who they most recently sought for advice and to rate these individuals on each attribute. Finally, they were asked to identify how likely they were to seek help from the individual, and how satisfied they were with the help they had received. These answers were used as a measure for the success of the relationship. All nine of the attributes had significantly positive correlations to the success measures. A factor analysis grouped the attributes into four different factors. The Counseling Factor (Assurance, Guidance, Emotional Support and Communication) was identified as the one that had the most significant impact on the success of the Provider/Recipient Relationship. The Knowledge Factor (Knowledge) also had a significant but lesser effect. The Friendship Factor (Peer Similarities and Personal Familiarity) and the Professional Factor (Professional Familiarity and Physical Proximity) had no significant effect. The results suggest that IS Managers should give more attention to developing the Counseling Factor attributes in IS support Providers. The results also suggest that researchers in End-user Computing should examine more closely the effect of the Counseling Factor on the success of IS Support functions in particular and IS departments in general.