It Shouldn’t Be Hard for IT Leadership to Gain Insights Into Their Own Infrastructure. So What’s the Holdup?

We’ve come a long way since the medieval days of back-office Information Technology.

Today’s IT organization plays a leadership role in overall business operations and in facilitating customer communications and transactions. In fact, IT is now pervasive across the business and is relied upon to solve critical problems related not just to customer service availability, but to business planning, new service development and cost-time efficiencies.

In this complex, fast-paced world, it is more important than ever for the IT executive to keep abreast of active issues facing the organization – and their impact on the business.

As the top IT exec, you’re the person that is supposed to have all the answers to the questions. Therefore, you need to be constantly updated on the status of affected systems and efforts underway to resolve issues.

Email and SMS notifications don’t cut it. To make educated decisions – often under pressure – you need to have a complete snapshot of your entire IT service delivery infrastructure, with the ability to drill down into the details.

Challenges to visibility

Despite these new requirements, IT leadership is often in the dark when things go wrong – and sometimes even when things go right. If these visibility challenges apply to you, you are not alone:

• Your organization struggles to provide you with a concise, accurate picture of IT service delivery problems
• You are plagued by multiple requests for status updates from your bosses, each of whom is concerned about how an issue will impact their particular service
• There a perception that there is a lack of focus on critical business needs by IT – as a result, a lack of understanding among business leaders leads to a tendency to question your IT budget

Why is an executive snapshot so hard to deliver? Because it’s a complex problem that combines elements of visibility, situational awareness, communication and domain knowledge.

Enter the Optanix Mobile App, a simple smartphone-based tool that leverages new technology to deliver a relevant, concise, bird’s-eye view of IT operations to IT leaders via push notifications. The mobile app increases visibility to the status of environments supported by internal teams and Optanix ITMaaS, and to the efforts that support teams are taking to maintain the network.

The mobile app leverages the versatility of mobile technology to make this information convenient and useful. It visualizes problems by enabling IT execs to interactively filter criteria and add extra sensitivity to certain services or performance metrics, such as, for example, the availability of devices with chronic problems.

Key features for IT execs

IT leaders can use the mobile app to:

• Gain visibility into issues that may be impacting business services
• Manage accountability for outages and responses, identify ownership, assess outage severity and obtain anticipated down times
• Monitor service responsiveness and manage workgroup efforts, including responses to escalations
• Quickly access summary level details
• Manage workflow, including fast delegation and prioritization of work for the IT support team

Push notifications

Because it keeps IT leadership abreast of issues, the ability of the Optanix Mobile App to support push notifications is a game changer.

Notifications can be tailored such that subscribers only receive items that they are directly interested in. For example, as service outages are reported by users, IT execs can be proactively made aware of the status of efforts to remediate the underlying problem.

With the mobile app, IT leadership also benefits from the ability of the Optanix Platform to associate roles with service delivery entities. This provides meaningful information as to what business services are affected, instead of a confusing stream of device and event alarms. Alarm streams add to the perception of confusion and inactivity, and to the organization’s inability to resolve problems.

The ability to look up cases and drill down into tickets is invaluable when trying to stay informed and keep others informed about service delivery issues. By the same token, the ability to stay on top of internal and external SLAs directly impacts the overall value of the IT organization.

The Optanix Mobile App results in improved IT organizational responsiveness and minimized service impact. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t hurt that it also helps educate, inform and keep upper management calm in the face of service delivery issues.

Click here to learn more about the beneficial features of the Optanix Mobile App.