Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials featuring Tim Gunn, the steely-haired fashion guru generally beloved by my wife and reality-TV addicts across the globe.  I’ll be honest, I don’t follow his guidance, as anyone who follows me can attest. 

However, he’s come to my attention as the spokesman for Tide’s “Total Care” brand of detergents, a line of more expensive products that promises to keep your clothes looking newer longer.

I’ve noticed this marketing trend showing up everywhere: times are tough, money’s scarce, so instead of buying brand new stuff, spend a few extra dollars to take care of what you already own to make it better.

Sales of Tide are proving that the idea appeals to economizing families. The snowballing reduction in IT spending shows the idea has also occurred to businesses. Companies are concentrating on finding ways to make the most of the software they’ve got – attempting to make existing IT processes respond faster, cost less or provide agility to the business. 

That makes projects that accelerate and streamline existing systems particularly attractive. For example, instead of tearing out your existing help desk and change systems, use an Alert Management platform to make them faster. Instead of struggling to staff extensive monitoring systems, allow Alert Management’s Mobile Gateway aspect to mobilize your workforce. In a time when you’re probably stuck with the system you’ve got, anything that makes it function better should be looked into. As Tim Gunn would say, “make it work.”
 

Dear concerned Executives,
 
In the latest secret CXO newsletter and coupon book, many of you shared your fears about staying afloat in these trying times. I understand how you feel – the world can be a scary place when everyone starts hoarding their cash and snarling when you suggest you might like some of it.
 
More and more, it seems like the question of “will you give me a large sum of money for my product?” will be met with an unequivocal “no” and possibly some hysterical laughter.  I’m here to tell you that that’s a complete misconception.

The key to selling in this climate is to help enterprises become more agile and competitive by delivering real value to their business.  Isn’t that our job anyway?  Ah, a return to the renaissance of providing value.  Your customers, especially if you’re doing any business-to-business work, are looking to cut costs and probably reallocate staff.  When times are tough, they want to be tougher, leaner and faster. They’ll buy your product if you can understand their business and provide a real return on the investment of resources and risk.

The products I’m working on can do that: they make an organization more efficient and intentional.  Alert Management is often the missing link for businesses that want to do more with less. So to be successful in this economy, do what I do: find the place in your customer’s business that’s struggling and help them shore it up.  If someone finds a way to do that for my organization, I’ll buy their product in a heartbeat – it’s worth it to me to keep my business strong and efficient in the long run.

So that’s my advice, everyone.  Good luck, we’ll be stronger for it! 

Sincerely,
Troy

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.

President Obama’s economic stimulus plan is currently pouring billions into local and state governments. A lot is going toward construction – highways, bridges, and your usual slew of New Deal infrastructure projects. I, however, think some of that money should go in a different direction: innovation, investment in increasing the agility of the American business and, of course, software.
 
Initially, buying new software doesn’t seem like the kind of job-making initiative the President had in mind; not a lot of shovels involved. But it would be an investment in our future: not in physical roads, but instead in technical infrastructure. Let’s take this sudden windfall and invest in the technology behind public services like schools, hospitals and social programs to help them work better, faster and cheaper.

Implementing Alert Management software would allow public sector organizations like local governments to automatically call or email residents to warn of anything from a terror attack to an overdue water bill. Schools could automatically send students SMS messages about emergencies or changes in schedule and parents could be notified in real-time of important announcements. Hospitals could send out thousands of emails to a blood donor registry in seconds and allow doctors to answer health questions and concerns from patients over their mobile phones.

The increased efficiency would mean millions in savings every year, and unlike other automation initiatives, it would not result in layoffs. All these organizations are struggling to hire enough people. Wasting precious employee time on manual, repetitive tasks helps no-one, and eliminating those tasks would allow staff to move to more productive projects.

Obviously, if government and public services start buying software, the IT industry would benefit, too.  As the CEO of a software company, I certainly can’t say this didn’t occur to me. But with IT spending declining at 9% annually and technology companies slashing jobs at an alarming rate, a combined push for buying new software and revolutionizing social services seems like it would be right up Mr. Obama’s alley.
 

Microsoft has recently added a "Fix it" button to some of the help documents on its website. Instead of asking users to go through 15 steps to diagnose and resolve a problem manually, they just wrote a script. It’s so staggeringly simple that it’s amazing nobody thought of it before – one automation step that saves everyone time and gets the job done.

Alert Management is ITSM’s “Fix it” button. When something goes wrong in an internal IT system, someone has to fix it. And usually someone can – there are plenty of competent people around who can resolve issues quickly. The problem isn’t getting event information to plenty of people – it’s getting it to the one person who’s on call, who understands this application, who’s not on vacation, who has access to their phone right now.

Most companies are like old-school Microsoft users. They manually walk through a dozen unnecessary steps – get the ticket, find the right rotation group, contact the person on-call, when she doesn’t answer, open an excel doc and start searching for the best way to escalate.  15 minutes later, work finally begins on the incident.

Alert Management automates this entire process. No more excel spreadsheet, no multiple steps, just one, single, easy “Fix it” button. Now if only someone could make one of those for, say, the economy.

In recent years, outsourcers and managed providers have been doing great. MSPs who monitor, manage and resolve issues in a client’s IT infrastructure from their own command center, never having to actually step into the customer’s site, can be a big asset for companies seeking to lower in-house IT costs.

This rapidly growing industry is even getting a boost from the economic turbulence shaking some businesses out of their comfort zones.  Often times the need to reduce costs happens in-house and hiring an external vendor to manage certain areas of the business makes sense.  However, with more MSPs emerging and managing ever-expanding systems and processes, SLAs that promise proactive results are growing harder to fulfill.

Successful MSPs must find ways to become more proactive, handling a wide range of incidents faster and cheaper than their competitors. Implementing an Alert Management platform can widen the competitive advantage by making sure the right personnel are being alerted of the right events automatically. By doing so consistently and accurately, Alert Management ensures that an MSP knows about an incident before their customers and can resolve it quickly.

The additional visibility provided by an Alert Management platform can also help MSPs satisfy their client’s demands. Customers can receive proactive information into service impacts and every event is recorded and archived, every resolution stringently documented. The client can take a look and see their money being spent effectively and efficiently. As belts tighten and the MSP market continues to grow, that visibility and efficiency can be key to differentiate the creative service provider from the pack.

The average cost of a call to the help desk varies – for most businesses it hovers around $20-$30. Many calls come from internal users reporting a service disruption – I can’t get my email! – or frustrated customers battling a defect. Service desk technicians can only assure the caller that someone’s fixing it, no… really… and please stop yelling.

Often a help desk call marks the first time an incident’s detected.  It’s not a good sign when a customer spots a problem before you do, even if it doesn’t result in broken service level agreements and hefty fees.  So to improve service levels and reduce help desk calls, your company may want to concentrate on two things:

1. Sending proactive alerts to users before they have a chance to call the help desk.

2. Spotting incidents before your customers do and fixing them fast, before service interruption.

Both objectives can be achieved with Alert Management. Monitoring, planning and help desk apps constantly send out alerts about possible issues, currently in the form of mass emails or pages. Swamped personnel can simply ignore them or assume someone else will get to it.  Effective Alert Management creates accountability within the help desk and automatically targets relevant alerts to the right people, dramatically speeding up mean-time-to-repair.

Almost more important for help desk personnel, effective Alert Management processes can include functionality that proactively notifies customers of a problem. Just think of it - automatically emailing, calling, texting or IM’ing a few thousand users about a service outage costs practically nothing. Hoping they don’t notice costs, well, about $25 per call – and let’s not even get into the mental anguish when the yelling begins…

To learn more about how proactive notification can help your business, click here.

In lean times, certain things become very important. In this particular economic crisis, those things appear to be whether you really needed all that 401K money, what kind of puppy Barrack Obama is getting and what each person in your organization is doing right now to ensure your business survives and grows stronger. 

While the first two can’t be improved much by enterprise software, effective Alert Management can help you address the third. Managing and tracking the way your team handles incidents allows you to easily access and improve productivity and efficiency, holding each person accountable for their actions.

Alert Management software puts an end to mass notification, targeting each alert from your monitoring, planning and help desk apps to the person or team with the skills to resolve them. The excuses “I thought someone else was handling it” or “It wasn’t relevant to me” fall apart when role-specific notifications are automatically delivered according to self-service and manager-assigned subscriptions and scheduling. Even the “I was out of the office!” defense doesn’t work with capabilities like two-way communication to mobile devices.

Effective Alert Management will track every issue and help you understand how quickly and effectively each member of each team is working to resolve it. Who’s pulling their weight and who’s hiding out?  In the tough days to come, knowing that might be even more important than the other great question of our times: should the presidential puppy be named Lemon or Walnuts?