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Barbara Dove Follows Technology Trends
By Kristin Clifford, staff writer
Barbara Dove has been in the IT industry for more than 20 years, and started her own company, Dove Help Desk, five years ago.
"My background is in process engineering and quality," Dove said. "If you want to make things work better, you have to understand the problems people have. Since people are challenged with many computer problems, it seemed a good place to start, so I created a help desk. My background in customer service afforded me the tools I needed to run the business."
Since its inception in 2003 the company has grown to include nine employees. Initially she began her company with technicians with considerable experience, but as her company grew, she has seen the benefit of growing new talent, and has realized the importance of training and planning.
Dove joined CompTIA to help in that aspect.
"I like to use CompTIA for research," Dove said. "There are a lot of things that we do that have already been done. I like to get search reports and white papers through CompTIA to find out more about how I can improve my business."
In her time in the industry, Dove has noticed many changes. Foremost among those is the accessibility of the technology. Certain technologies, Dove said, were not available at the small business level because of the high cost.
"The IT department 20 years ago was the department you cut back," Dove said. "It was never funded properly. You could never get enough of the right kind of equipment. We had to come up with creative ways to find the equipment we needed for our IT infrastructure."
Dove recalled building a whole reliability lab and getting the PCs they needed by requesting the equipment for reliability testing and requisitioning it out of the stock.
"But you had to do things like that because you couldn't come up with the budget to give everybody a PC," Dove said. "The department would have one PC and everybody would share it. Well you can see how impossible it was."
Dove's company aims to provide helpdesk assistance to companies with smaller IT departments, participating in the very accessibility trend she had been noticing.
Another trend she noticed is how technologically-dependent the world has become, a far cry from 20 years ago when IT departments were the last departments to receive funding.
"I mean, people today are walking around with cell phones that have everything on them and they depend on those cell phones to get them connected with their jobs and businesses," Dove said. "So what happened is the IT department, instead of being something that was funded when you had an extra dollar, is something that is funded immediately."
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