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The early warning symptoms of an IT catastrophe must be identified in time to prevent a total collapse of enterprise IT system. IT crisis can cripple your enterprise if you are not able to effectively curb the spread of shadow IT in your organization or have been neglecting break-down of same systems.
Issues with Alert Fatigue
IT managers must be able to distinguish between noisy alerts and critical alerts that beg for immediate attention. While performing real-time monitoring of critical IT systems, IT managers are prone to develop alert fatigue because the majority of alerts are either informational or other issues that they are already aware of.
Alert fatigue can lead to serious issues as critical alerts are neglected just because the staff has failed to differentiate these from noisy alerts. If your enterprise is chained to traditional tools, then the noisy alerts will drain your IT staff to the extent that they start ignoring even the real issues. It is natural for the attending staff to get tired by constantly attending to noisy alerts.
This calls for proper prioritization of issues by analyzing backlog that has potential to impact clients. Any issue that is going to affect customers will eventually impact your own systems. Metrics can help become proactive while responding to critical issues, which can work as warning signals.
The key is to attend to problems much before these can precipitate in customer issues.
Address Moral Issues
The best way to diagnose lack of morale is to keep watch on the inflow of fresh ideas. The moment you feel that your subordinates are not coming up with fresh strategies, you can assume that their morale needs to be boosted. Great managers are always bubbling with new ideas to approach issues.
There is another angle to shortage of ideas. The advent of shadow IT can potentially impact the flow of new strategies. You must take necessary steps to prevent shadow IT from getting out of control and overshadowing your IT systems.
Spread of shadow IT can be arrested by encouraging an environment of collaboration and development of a mature and innovative team of managers. Employees need to contribute seriously instead of using the organizational resources for their personal development. Overwork and stress should also be avoided because these factors can lead to a worn out feeling.
Attending to Same Issues
A major IT debacle due to an isolated failure is an extreme rarity. In fact, there are a number of minor issues that could accumulate and snowball into a widespread catastrophe. These issues could be associated with undiagnosed outages, delays in the accomplishment of simple tasks, and so forth.
Add to this an omnipresent inefficiency that is impacting the majority of enterprises and also the presence of legacy systems that are responsible for employee burn out. One must always think of effectively phasing out the old systems and replace these with new and more advanced options. The fast pace of changing technologies underline the need to for continuous improvement without clinging to the traditional systems that can seriously hamper employee efficiency.
Dwindling Complaints from Users
Anybody would welcome the idea of receiving a smaller number of complaints day after day. Actually, there is more to it than meets the eye because customers tend to avoid complaining if they feel that it would be futile to do so. The lesser amount of complaints indicates the growth of shadow IT because the user population is no more confident of getting their issues resolved through regular channels.
You should always be capable of explaining the upward or downward trend in the quantity of help requests. The more requests could be on account of a significant upgrade and lesser number of help tickets point to the development of shadow IT. There could be a serious IT issue at hand if you fail to justify the ups and downs in number of help requests.
Mergers and Acquisitions
There are times when you come across unknown people in the organization and suddenly there is news about a merger or acquisition, which explains so many new faces around you. This can be either a good or bad news from different perspectives. However, for the IT department, it is an extremely stressful situation to accommodate new policies and strategies.
Such developments have potential to retard processes of innovation unless a proper strategy for integration is adopted. No company can hope to survive if the innovative processes take a back seat.
Understand the Risk of Shipping Huge Codes
There is a direct proportion of the volume of code that is being shipped and the possibility of something going seriously wrong. These issues have the potential of hampering the entire system. You must resist the temptation of knocking everything at on go because this can lead to triggering of a large number of more serious events.
This underlines the essence of shipping lighter volumes of codes that can bring about small changes. Such an exercise can be performed more frequently to avoid impact on enterprise IT.
