Killing the Last IT Dinosaur

People are still getting paid to sit in a room and watch a screen. And not a screen with anything good on it, either – no movies, no iPod, no IM.  Any work is good work these days, but this job contributes nothing to the success or agility of the business. It’s simply a necessary evil. Someone has to keep an eye on the status of various system and applications. All around is buzzing modern technology that keeps banks, retail chains and vast telecommunications companies running, and yet people are still sitting at a console, waiting for the light to go red.
 
This would be an unfortunate way to spend your time in 1990, an alarming use of resources in 2000, and borders on criminally inefficient in 2009. Efficiency is the name of the game in a harsh economic climate, and it simply makes no sense to give a trained IT professional a console and tell him or her to stare at it to make sure nothing goes wrong.

Keeping employees watching for problems 24/7 is also extremely expensive. By reallocating one rotation team of 12 from their 24/7 monitoring team, a major European energy provider saved $750,000 annually.  This was an easy, welcomed change to the operation.  It just required that their notification system catch up to the rest of their technology.

Automation is key: if a red light comes up on a screen, automatically send the right person information about the problem so they can fix it. Have their contact, role and scheduling information in the system already. Then let them take responsibility for that alert from their mobile phone and, better yet, use a web portal to let them enter internal systems and take action to resolve the event. Even if it wakes a user up in the middle of the night, it’s still better than staring at a blinking screen that may – horror of horrors – not even have internet access.

To learn more about the kind of cost savings increased efficiency can create, check out my latest whitepaper, 5 Ways to Increase Operational Effectiveness and Reduce Costs Through Alert Management.