www.greg-wright.co.uk

When I was a Siemens some years ago, I wrote a simple intranet site which had several important functions:

1. Links to documentation
2. An area where staff could log and view changes made to the system
3. An area where errors were reported

The later part was linked to an SMS alert system and an on-call database, so serious errors caused SMS Text messages to be sent to the primary on-call staff. If the staff did not acknowledge the error in a few minutes the message was forwarded to secondary on-call staff.

This brought many benefits. All staff were aware of system changes. All staff were aware of who made changes. All staff and management had visibility of problems leading to an openness in the department. The error stats could be used to drive improvments to the systems.

Resolutions were also recorded leading to a problem/solution knowledge base.

This lead to other people developing new applications on the system for example someone linked in the Big Brother system monitoring tool so we had global visibility of the state of our network and the alert system interfaced to the Big Brother messages for free.

We tied in a job control and monitoring system which could manage business IT processes across a whole network of servers, preventing certain jobs from running until prerequisite jobs had been run successfully, and alerting support staff when things went wrong.

The net effect was process improvement (and vast saving is existing software costs!).