A company that provides help-desk support, Intelliteach, analyzed 600,000 helpdesk tickets from numerous law firms over a nine-month period. Graphically displayed in ILTA’s quarterly PeertoPeer, Dec. 2010 at 65, the categories where problems arose probably map well to the problems that arise for members of law departments.
The largest set of inquiries concerned Microsoft Outlook (fully 10% of the calls to Intelliteachthe help desk), Microsoft Word (about 8%) and “Document management” (perhaps 5-6%). After them in decreasing frequency were IT calls – as distinguished from helpdesk calls – about printers, “Admin”, the network, and servers.
I suspect in-house legal teams also call the technology support staff about applications more than hardware, and the applications they use most are e-mail and word processing (See my post of July 28, 2010: four levels of IT support for one law department.).