The trading system is down.  It’s up.  Is it up?  What happened?  Who fixed it?  Who didn’t?

The necessity for real-time visibility (who is working issues) and historic visibility (audit trail) in IT is often touted and just as often overlooked.  Each system and application within IT uses its own reporting tools, leaving no clear way to track everything that has taken place to resolve an incident. The Operations Center will make call outs and send notifications.  Seemingly doing the right thing.  But how do we know who touched an event, what they did and when it was restored?

The engineer will take an action in HP OMU, then another in BMC Remedy, then move on to another system, all to address a single problem.  Everything makes sense at the time, but looking back it’s nearly impossible to understand who did what when.

Lacking a comprehensive audit trail and real-time visibility into the process can cause other problems, as well.  For example, one customer I work with is among the largest grocery chains in the United States, with over 3,500 stores nationwide.  Whenever a product recall occurred, each store had to be manually contacted to remove the defective product from its shelves.  This manual process was agonizingly slow, but more importantly, it left no audit trail.  If the company was sued because someone purchased dangerous food, they would have no way to prove that they had been in the process of removing the tainted products.  Bad yogurt is a big deal.  It’s an incident and it has to be efficiently managed.  Our customer was able to save $8 million by automating this process. 

Also, don’t forget to register for next week’s webinar: Four Best Practices to Increase the Relevance of IT Across the Business.  In today’s market, IT organizations are struggling with how to automate repeatable tasks, measure and optimize processes, enable accountability and increase their contribution to the overall business. In this webinar, you'll find out how to implement four best practices to enable your IT organization to be viewed as a key contributor to the success of the core business as well as your customer's customer.
Wednesday, February 24th, 8:00am PDT:  Register Now
 

Who doesn’t want to be “Relevant”?  That is what we all strive for.  Relevance and recognition.  We are hosting a series of webinars, as previously advertised, but these are really more like town hall discussions.  We will be discussing how you can increase your Relevance in the eyes of your customer.  These webinars take place every other Wednesday at 8AM pacific for the next six weeks, the first being February 10th.  We will be sharing some creative ideas, tested best practices and methods to increase your “Relevance Ratio”…you have to tune in to find out what that actually means. 

So why does recognition rock, you ask?  Well, coincidentally Gartner released their MarketScope for Emergency and Mass Notification Services where the authors cite the following recognition of AlarmPoint within IT Service Management:  “The Telalert product, now owned by MIR3, used to be the leader, but AlarmPoint has definitely usurped that position…”  Thank you very much!   It’s not often that hard work is recognized, but if you focus on raising your Relevance Ratio…good things happen.  We’d like to share ideas on how IT Service Management, IT Operations and other leading firms are raising their Relevance Ratios!