Capture Your Tribal IT Knowledge and Put it to Work. It Can Galvanize Your Team to Help You Get Better Every Day.

When you fight the little IT battles on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget about the big war going on. That’s the big picture war – the one where you need to ensure your organization is operating at a profit and that IT services are always available.

And while you’re at it, you need to make sure your IT department is recognized for its contribution to the bottom line.

For the most part, it seems like you are able to take care of the battles. But are you winning the war?

First, it helps to establish your overall strategic goals. Then, take a step back to figure out if you’re making progress. Now ask yourself: What can you do to make sure that your efforts from the day-to-day battles are helping you make progress toward your goals? Can you capitalize on these efforts to get better every day?

Many of you will find that your everyday efforts to keep the infrastructure going hobble you to the extent that you struggle to find time to tackle your strategic goals around improving your capabilities.

Here are some suggestions for capitalizing on your day-to-day efforts:

• Capture the tribal knowledge you know you already have. Every time you put out a fire, make sure you document how you did so.
• Now that you have this knowledge documented, turn it into a repeatable process. Then you can train new support personnel to solve the same problems.
• Next, determine if there are ways to automate these solutions. Automations can help you save hours of unnecessary labor every day.

These incremental adaptations can have real, immediate benefits. They can help you improve day-upon-day, month-upon-month and year-upon-year. They can yield measurable benefits that show just how much better your IT management capabilities actually are getting over time. Improvements like this can help you finally stop the endless debate around “is the IT organization delivering?” every time there’s a board meeting.

Just by capturing your tribal knowledge, you can change the culture so there are fewer fire drills, a constantly expanding consciousness and improved awareness and capabilities. You can build a system that not only provides tactical level remediation, case management and notification, but goes on to provide a mechanism to enable compliance and governance.

The Optanix Platform is an excellent starting place for capturing and automating tribal knowledge. It provides a comprehensive, extensible and integrated approach to IT infrastructure management. From rapid root cause analysis, to remediation activities and the associated business impact, the Optanix Clean Signal excels at supporting basic operational issues around IT management.

The Optanix Platform has extensive capabilities to capture workflows that can then be automated as desired. This ability is key to encapsulating repeatable tasks. When it comes to monitoring, templates can be readily deployed to efficiently gather information from devices. When it comes to diagnostics, test and failure scenarios can be efficiently executed. As new workflows are developed, support staff can encode their own profiles to further evolve capabilities.

The integrated nature of case management and notification within the platform enables ITIL compliance and governance workflows. By standardizing and incorporating workflows for incident, problem and change management, support teams can dramatically increase their productivity, accountability and compliance to get better every day and provide measurable service improvement.

To learn more about the Optanix Platform and its capabilities, please visit www.optanix.com.