The suspicion is that we're bottoming out. The economy is still tough, of course, but it might not get more terrible. Then again, Warren Buffet says we're all doomed. I have to use my entrepreneur’s sense of never-ending optimism and say I know better than Buffet, but even with my reassurance, the message most businesses and families are getting is this: we’re still in frugal mode. For families, sadly, my only advice is fewer $4 cups of Joe. For businesses, I have a few more ideas about how to make the most of a tight operating spend.
The obvious one is automation. Automating manual processes takes errors, wait-time and non-value-added tasks out of the equation and, in so doing, makes things run faster and at lower cost. One area of the enterprise that many people overlook for automation is communication and notification, particularly when things go wrong.
Who gets called when a server fails, a service goes out, or a disaster occurs? The people who can fix the problem, of course, but also the micromanaging CEO to let her know you've identified the issue and begun work. Then there are the customers and business users who should be warned before they call in to complain.
But even the first step of that process – finding the right person to fix the problem – is completely manual in most companies. A panicked admin leafs through a stack of excel documents or an outdated help desk list, calls them, gets to voice-mail, moves on to the next guy on the list, calls him, finds out that he's on vacation. This process continues for minutes or hours until someone finally fixes the problem.
Why not automate? Deliver relevent information immediately into the hands of the person who can fix the problem or instantly escalate to the next available user if necessary. The issue gets fixed faster. Simple. One of our customers took up automation and saved $1.8 million in service support costs per year. This is a company with 2,000 employees. $1.8 million a year out of an operating budget is big bucks.
An automated Alert Management system also logs every action and will inform affected business personnel about the impact so they don’t call and harass the help desk. The value is rapid and meaningful and that micromanaging CEO has full visibility to the issue and the restoration so she can go micromanage someone else ;-). Automation changes everything: problems are solved, service is available, harmony breaks out.
