We all recognize that people within our organization work according to different roles. When you look at your organization in the light of IT awareness we often use a scale where IT knowledge and IT skills are the differentiators. At Open Horizons we use this scale to define a number of different roles, so we can earmark our offerings and target them at the right audience.
The first group of people can be described as the real "End User", a person who is using computers for basic tasks, like the creation of documents, sending of e-mails, making appointments and so on.
Next on our scale is what we call the "Power User", a group which contains for example secretaries or other staff members, with more needs and bigger demands of the IT infrastructure. They create and use shared folders, create and share contact information, create and manage appointments for (larger) groups of people and so on. Quite often people from this group are very involved with IT, sometimes they are demanding and critical and they have a big need for more information to work more efficiently. Quite often they help their co-workers when they've questions about IT, which is often called peer-to-peer support.
The next group on this scale is a group of "IT Professionals", for example IT Managers looking for optimization and better Return on Investment
(ROI) of their IT environment or people working at Service Desks. Their role is to support the first two groups, collecting and delivering the right information to optimize workloads and to enable decision making processes. They need to know more about all of the possibilities and options which a solution can offer. This group is however often not primarily concerned or even interested in more technical IT skills, which is the domain of the last group.
The "IT Experts" are responsible for the creation and maintenance of all front- and back-end IT services, sometimes hard core IT nerds ready to open servers, dive into wiring closets and so on. No mountain is to high on a technical level, however they're themselves not often using their own IT environment in quite the same way as the aforementioned groups. Unfortunately, as the are "the experts", they're sometimes bothered with questions from end or power users that they rather would avoid to answer, as they don't have the working experiences which are aligned with those groups. Quite often the Service Desks refers those request to this group and too often those "How to do.." questions remain unanswered.
End User
Power User
IT Professional
IT Expert
At GroupWiseR we try to offer solutions for at least three out of the four groups, our focus has been at the last three groups: the Power User, the IT Professional and the IT Expert. In most cases there is already a lot fo information for the end user and the IT expert, we try to offer more and more information for the other two groups in the middle as well.
We deliver events, books and training aimed at these groups. An example is "The GroupWise Powerguide", a book which is aimed at those with basic knowledge of GroupWise and want to learn more. We expect that the reader has used the basic features of GroupWise
before as we start our exciting discovery trip through the many
possibilities of GroupWise. Most of what we describe is "front-end"
stuff only, but sometimes we will have to include some back-end
administration tools as well. It some cases the reader might not have
access to these tools nor should an "ordinary" user have access to them
in most cases. Still, we included these parts to show the overall
picture of how to manage a GroupWise environment.
The first group of people can be described as the real "End User", a person who is using computers for basic tasks, like the creation of documents, sending of e-mails, making appointments and so on. 
Next on our scale is what we call the "Power User", a group which contains for example secretaries or other staff members, with more needs and bigger demands of the IT infrastructure. They create and use shared folders, create and share contact information, create and manage appointments for (larger) groups of people and so on. Quite often people from this group are very involved with IT, sometimes they are demanding and critical and they have a big need for more information to work more efficiently. Quite often they help their co-workers when they've questions about IT, which is often called peer-to-peer support.
The next group on this scale is a group of "IT Professionals", for example IT Managers looking for optimization and better Return on Investment
(ROI) of their IT environment or people working at Service Desks. Their role is to support the first two groups, collecting and delivering the right information to optimize workloads and to enable decision making processes. They need to know more about all of the possibilities and options which a solution can offer. This group is however often not primarily concerned or even interested in more technical IT skills, which is the domain of the last group.
The "IT Experts" are responsible for the creation and maintenance of all front- and back-end IT services, sometimes hard core IT nerds ready to open servers, dive into wiring closets and so on. No mountain is to high on a technical level, however they're themselves not often using their own IT environment in quite the same way as the aforementioned groups. Unfortunately, as the are "the experts", they're sometimes bothered with questions from end or power users that they rather would avoid to answer, as they don't have the working experiences which are aligned with those groups. Quite often the Service Desks refers those request to this group and too often those "How to do.." questions remain unanswered.
