Message in a Bottleneck – Part 3

In the final installment of his three-part blog, Peter Tanner, CEO of Boomerang, concludes his thoughts on effective incident management communication and how this can have a major bearing on business productivity and profitability.

 Optimising incident management

The most proactive businesses are recognising the benefits of bringing automation into incident management processes, and are deploying leading-edge technologies to reconfigure and align escalation pathways with incident procedures and SLAs. And in a burgeoning communications landscape where users ‘consume’ media across a variety of devices, the most effective models of automation will harness multiple channels to ensure that critical incident data can be accessed, acknowledged and administered by relevant stakeholders, irrespective of users’ communications type. The resilience of having multiple distribution channels available to fall back on in the event one goes down substantially increases the likelihood of reaching key stakeholders, accelerates problem resolution and, in the process minimizes the human, operational and financial costs of critical incidents.

Software to support incident notification and management has an application across every industry. From transport to retail, manufacturing to healthcare – and, indeed, the quite topical management of environmental disasters such as flooding or power failure – agile and interactive communications tools can dramatically alleviate disruption and expedite activity.

Such solutions also have a powerful utility in the rapidly-expanding machine-to-machine (M2M) environment, which is currently estimated as a $32 billion global marketplace. Organisations are currently investing heavily in M2M infrastructure, but as the practice becomes embedded, many are going to find themselves with thousands of alerts rolling in, but with no idea how to manage them.

Innovative threading technology can open up transparent dialogue between employees and end users, and can significantly enhance an organisation’s ability to manage, escalate and resolve incidents, quickly and cost-effectively.

The Sting in the tale

The effective management of critical incidents can have a major bearing on business productivity and profitability. A failure to address this important area in line with the changing paradigm of business communications will not only leave companies reliant on the modern-day equivalent of a message in a bottle, but rather like The Police, the most recognizable outcome will only ever be the Sting in the tail.