* It's time to take better control of your event resolution process
How often does this happen in your organization: an IT service disruption occurs, and you can’t find the right person who can resolve the problem quickly. Maybe it’s because you don’t know who is accountable for resolving this particular type of problem. Perhaps the main troubleshooter is unavailable and you don’t know who to turn to next. Or it could be that the help desk assigned the case to a consultant without the expertise or knowledge to take care of the matter. Whatever the reason, the disruption continues to drag on and worker productivity comes to a halt.
If you are nodding your head to this scenario because you live it more often than you care to admit, then it’s time to take better control of your event resolution process.
Most midsize to large organizations have been marching toward implementation of some sort of IT service management (ITSM) system. Major systems management vendors like BMC Software, CA (formerly Computer Associates), HP and IBM have been pushing solutions aimed at helping enterprises manage the full lifecycle of an IT service.
A key facet to ITSM is understanding how various IT systems and components (i.e., servers, routers, etc.) affect critical business processes. For example, if the Web hosting server goes down, then the e-commerce part of the business is offline, and this impacts sales. Typically such an event would trigger a help desk trouble ticket, and a technician would be assigned to the case.
But simply assigning the case isn’t good enough in today’s fast-paced world of ITSM. The help desk needs an automated method to find the most appropriate person available at that specific time to address the problem, and then follow-up to make sure the person has taken accountability to resolve the case, and then does, indeed, fix the problem. This way, a case isn’t left hanging if the first person in the line of support is unavailable when the trouble ticket is generated.
AlarmPoint Systems fills this need for event notification and resolution with the product AlarmPoint Enterprise. This product automates the process of assigning responsibility for specific events.
AlarmPoint Enterprise integrates with all the major networking monitoring tools. Event notifications coming from those tools trigger a look-up in the AlarmPoint system to see who should be notified and how (i.e., via e-mail, pager, IM, phone call). If the first line of support is unavailable, AlarmPoint can go through a chain of responsible people until the case is accounted for.
AlarmPoint Enterprise focuses on critical aspects of event resolution:
* Matching events to people. You can do an intelligent match of events to people. You can also track and understand who someone is and what he knows (or should know). (“Megan is the company expert on blade server performance tuning.”)
* Self-managing contact information. The people who will be called upon to resolve incidents can enter and maintain their own contact information and preferences. (“If it’s between 8:00 AM and 5 PM Monday through Friday, call my office extension. On weekends, call my cell phone.”) This feature also allows for “follow the sun” assignments so that people in various time zones can share responsibility for an event, depending on when it happens.
* Assigning accountability. When a case is assigned to someone, he can acknowledge that he is responsible and take action. The system continues to follow-up until the case is resolved.
* Providing process visibility. AlarmPoint generates management reports that show how the event resolution process is doing – who is working, who is shirking, and how well things are going.
You can see where such a high level of accountability is important to effective IT service management. AlarmPoint automates the event resolution process so that human errors and unnecessary lag time are significantly reduced. If you want to see how other companies have already deployed this solution, check out the case studies on AlarmPoint’s Web site.
