Alert Management: Get Your Own “Fix It” Button

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.