IT Recognition Week: A Day in the Life of Kyle Pfeifer

On any given day, Pfeifer and his fellow team members will be tasked with a variety of jobs that are in the background, but have a big impact on day-to-day business, such as requests to deploy new computers/desk phones to departments, troubleshooting issues with Citrix, providing access to various files and folders on network drives and working on projects such as Evergreen, which involves gradually replacing older computers with newer models.

“I work on anywhere from 10-15 items a day, depending on how long each request takes,” Pfeifer noted. “I get tickets and tasks – tasks being user builds and terminations/transfers and tickets being regular day-to-day troubleshooting or deployment of equipment.”

What he can’t plan for are the urgent high priority calls he has to address immediately because it affects a clinical team member’s ability to do their job, such as triaging and fixing problems with the portable Workstation on Wheels (WOW) units nurses use to access patient health records and update vital statistics.

 Assessing the day’s tickets and prioritizing the order in which he deals with them helps him keep on track and can be challenging on days where high priority tickets require him to shift his focus, but he said it makes every day different and he enjoys working with others on the team.

“There is never a set schedule every day. It can be anything from setting up staff being onboarded with a new computer, mouse, and printer, to troubleshooting computer issues, to working on bigger projects like deploying all the new WIFI access points in the ceiling and replacing the old phone system,” Pfeifer said. “It’s never the same.”

He noted that when patient care is affected, it’s never a small thing.

“Even the smallest thing like a nurse’s keyboard doesn’t work; you may think it’s small but if they can’t enter information into medical records, it creates a huge issue and items like that can affect patient care,” he said.

The IT support analyst team works together to address all the issues, with more complex items sent up the chain to the senior analyst to address, such as WIFI dead zones.

Every day, the IT team works on fixing problems that may seem small in isolation but have a huge effect on the overall efficiency and effectiveness of staff. While challenging, Pfeifer said he enjoys his job being a cog in larger wheel that supports patient care and outcomes.

“I like the satisfaction of helping people. That’s why I like IT – everyone’s really grateful when you solve their problem,” Pfeifer explained. “It’s also rewarding to learn new things about different technology, which is constantly changing, and knowing that every day is going to be different.”

The best advice Pfeifer said he would pass on to someone interested in his job is to be patient.

“You’re not going to learn everything all in one week, or even a month. Even though I knew about IT, it took me a couple of years to learn the ins and outs of CKHA and how they work, and all the different stuff TransForm SSO uses, so don’t get down on yourself if you don’t learn everything right away,” Pfeifer noted. “Almost 8 years later, I’m still learning things all the time and we constantly get new things to be trained on. It’s a continual learning experience.”