A GPS for your business
Anytime, anywhere information technology. Today’s planes and cars are equipped with GPS devices that can proactively warn you the moment you veer off course. Tony Probert, European managing director of Cherwell Software says the same peace of mind is now available for the IT professional.
Accurate, timely and available data is the key to a successful organisation, without easy access to critical information how can any organisation know its current status and be in a position to make decisions about what actions it needs to make on a day to day basis.
Information technology is experiencing a ‘revolution’ with the development of web technologies and the increasing capabilities of smartphones – they are changing the rules of the game in the way we receive and respond to critical information. Access to real time information can help organisations react immediately to situations and events that impact their business, delivering real time course correction data and creating a business GPS system.
An IT revolution
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘revolution’ as “a dramatic and far reaching change”. In today’s IT world, when talking about web technologies and smartphones the word revolution is appropriate. We are on the verge of a radical change in the delivery of mission-critical information, and more importantly, the ability for people to make timely business decisions ‘on-the-fly’.
Recently our CEO was sitting in his Colorado office wondering, with some concern, how his eighteen-year old son was doing. The night before his son had departed to Ghana in Africa, and he knew (from one of the many iPhone apps) that his son’s plane had landed. Suddenly his iPhone beeped and there was a text message from his son, sent only seconds before, from the other side of the world. His son had merely hit the ‘reply’ button to a message that had been sent to him while he was travelling. The exploding worldwide network of mobile phone coverage recognised where he was in the world and immediately routed the text message back to our CEO’s cell phone in Colorado. The most amazing part of this story is how much we take for granted the instant access to such information.
The relief of knowing nearly instantaneously that his son was safe was wonderful, but it also caused him to reflect on the dramatic changes we are experiencing with web based technologies and mobile phone devices, and how they are radically changing our daily lives.
‘After the fact’ Information.
Not very long ago, IT data went into the proverbial ‘black hole’ and most information extracted from this dark repository was reviewed and acted upon too late, ‘after the fact’. Although many organisations were proud of their book of monthly reports, most of the information was never used nor acted upon in a timely manner. Information in printed reports, utilising historical data, is often too late to make course corrections. Admittedly, reporting is still important for trending and analysis. However, with the advent of this latest technology revolution, management and technicians alike are in a position to instantaneously receive and use data, no matter where they are, to make real-time decisions and instant course corrections.
How important is this? If you were taking a plane trip from London Heathrow to New York, but the flight was two-degrees off course, how far would you be from your destination on arrival? While it is true that being only two-degrees off would equate to success in most organisations, in this example, you would end up some 90 miles from your desired destination—an unacceptable result in air travel.
Accordingly, today’s planes and cars can be equipped with ‘revolutionary’ GPS devices that can proactively warn you the moment your journey has taken the wrong direction. Such information saves a lot of time and money by allowing us to make the right decisions and course corrections before it is too late to meet our timely objectives.
Real-time Information
With the new generation of web technologies and smartphones, real-time information in our IT business environments can be used to make course corrections along the way, anytime, anywhere. Equally important, because of how user-friendly these technologies have become, they are being used by people who were previously uncomfortable with the technology, or too busy to learn it.
During a visit to a major university our CEO had a meeting with the University president. He had been told that this brilliant PhD was not technically savvy and did not like to spend a lot of time on his computer. However, he noticed that the president did carry an iPhone. Before long, they were engaged in a passionate discussion about their iPhone applications, trying to convince each other which applications were the best. The president then was quite intrigued when our CEO told him that there are iPhone applications that could notify him of any change requests that required his approval, providing him all the details needed to make a decision. Change approvals are often a bottleneck in organisations, especially when some of the approvers are frequent travellers, making it difficult to stay online.
The inefficiencies and costs caused by delayed approvals are significant in organisations, especially for approvals at the C-level. Such change approvals at the C-level typically are to approve the most expensive acquisitions—those that presumably have the most positive impact to the organisation, and perhaps the most risk. Accordingly, such delays in the approval process can be the most critical, having a negative impact on business activities.
Change approval functionality is only the tip of the iceberg of possibilities. Imagine how a senior executive in an organisation could utilise drill-down dashboards on their smartphone that would show ‘real time’, all the key performance indicators impacting their business. They could be immediately notified if any of their key business metrics enter the ‘red zone’. This type of management efficiency has often been referred to as ‘management by exception’. In other words, managers do not want to be notified about information that is ‘normal’ or in the ‘green’ zone. Instead, they want to be immediately prompted when issues are in the ‘yellow’ or ‘red’ zones – when the business is ‘off course’.
The CEO or their core management team are not the only benefactors of this mobile revolution. The efficiencies gained by an organisation’s IT staff can be enormous. For example, when a technician now goes to an offsite location to deal with an incident or related task, they can open a browser or smartphone application and access all the incidents and tasks assigned to them. The technician can then close the incident or task, reassign it, or make notes for later follow-up — no matter where they are.
Twenty-five years ago, the idea that we would always carry a device in our pocket that could communicate instantaneously with anyone from anywhere at any time would be Star Trek fiction, “beam me up Scotty”. But it is a reality of the technology revolution. Today, the idea that management and technicians can access, from their pocket devices the necessary information to make vital course corrections — at anytime from anywhere — is truly revolutionary.
The benefits gained from the ability to make real-time change approvals and course corrections by management, together with the efficiencies gained by frontline technicians, represent radical change for our industry. It was once said “Revolutions never go backwards.” Revolutionary technology is available today and through the creation of a real time ‘Business GPS’ system, it will inevitably change the way an organisation manages data and management decisions are made.
