I was watching Aziz Ansari's comedy special, Dangerously Delicious last night and one of his bits was about communication and dating.  He had this gem that he threw out to start it off:

It made me think about all the different ways that we can be reached, and what the choice of communication channel says about the importance of the message itself.  Most of us now own a smartphone which means that there are more ways than ever to connect with someone: a phone call, email, text message (SMS), multimedia message (MMS), iMessage (Apple), BBM (RIM), instant message apps, social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), enterprise 2.0 apps (Yammer, Chatter), or any other application that can send you push notifications.  And let's add in home and office phones for good measure, some of which support multiple communication channels themselves.

If you're in IT, how would you want to be contacted for different types of issues that required your attention?  For companies that use an xMatters relevance engine as part of their IT Management process, here's a sample of what I typically recommend:

• Automated phone calls when assembling teams of fix agents to resolve major incidents. Your phone rings, you get a brief update, if your'e available to help you hit a button and you're connected into a conference call with the rest of the team.
• Text messages for SEV2 type issues, or when something has been waiting for your response for a while, like a ticket in your assignment queue, or a change requst that needs your approval.
• Emails for regular communications like status updates, lower severity issues, or non-critical change requests.

The right choice of how you deliver the message tells you something about the situation instantly.  If my phone rings and I see that it's xMatters calling, I know it must be something serious.  If my phone vibrates and I see that it's a text from xMatters, I know that it's something I need to address pretty quickly.  If I scan down my email and see a number of messages from xMatters, I know that there is activity around my area of responsiblity or interest that I should review.

The wrong choices can have painful consequences.  Too many automated phone calls will at the least annoy people, and worse can create a culture where people just ignore the calls and send them to voicemail, wasting the urgency effect.  Using email along means that you will lose any sense of differentiation to your communications.  We've all had the experience of seeing a bunch of emails in our inbox and thinking "Ugh, I'll deal with these as a batch later" without opening a single one.  If there was anything that needed your immediate action, that opportunity has been lost.

If you have a communication channel best practice you'd like to share, jump into the fray in the comments!

Oh, and if you want to catch Ansari's rant on texting, you can catch the short preview, or buy one hour special.  Totally worth $5.

Abbas Haider Ali.

Earlier this year, I ran across an interesting post on the CIO website talking about IT services firm Atos Origin and their battle against productivity losses due to email overload. 

A couple of weeks ago it came up again with stories from ABC News, Techcrunch, Business Insider, and even Engadget.  The hook?  CEO Thierry Breton wants to eliminate email entirely and move people over to social collaboration tools, exit messages, phone calls, and face to face meetings (!).

I do agree that email overload is a real issue and has resulted in some really off the wall behavior: 

• volume bragging - "I've been on a tear, getting 1000 emails a day"
• wrestling competitions - "Hit Inbox zero today"
• admissions of failure - "Finally gave up and just declared email bankruptcy. Deleted everything and starting from scratch."

However, killing email is probably a little extreme. 

One area where email is out of control is notifications for IT teams.  The xMatters Advisors team spends a lot of time talking to large enterprises about how they manage their IT environments, and in particular the communication approaches they use to engage people to take actions (fix stuff, approve things) and to give people a heads up (service outages, change windows).

A common element that we've observed is that there is a LOT of email traffic internal to the IT teams and a fair amount that is sent outside the team about what's happening with IT services.  Here's some common complaints:

• I'm on an email distro for IT alerts and get so many that I just ignore them (or have a rule that redirects them to a folder I never look at)
• We send emails out but for important stuff have to follow up with a text or phone call to actually make something happen
• When we get emails, we can't do anything with the messages themselves.  We have to call someone to approve a change or confirm that we're working on the issue. 
• We have to power up a laptop to get connected to the system that sent the email to figure out what's really going on
• We get emails for stuff on the weekend even when we're not on call
• IT doesn't let us know what's going on.  We're kept in the dark about what's going on.
• IT keeps sending us so many emails about what's going on that we just ignore all of them now.

In my view, the core of the problem isn't email itself.  It's how we use email, rely on it exclusively, and treat it like a one way communication channel.

When we deliver an IT relevance engine to a client, there are a lot of benefits that directly address this email overload problem:

• Individuals get fewer emails because they pass through many filters to ensure that communications only get sent to the people that should get it, based on schedule, on call rules, escalation structure, location, etc.
• When time is of the essence, either bypass email entirely, or use it just for a backup.  Primary communication switches over to SMS / text messages, or automated phone calls.
• Enable people to respond to the messages they receive in context of the issue and their role in the organization. Examples: I'll take the incident ticket, this change request needs more detail about impact, I'll be on the war room conference call in 15min, etc.
• Provide mobile access to IT management tools so whether you need to just get more information before making a decision, or you want to start working for wherever you are, you can do so quickly and using any smartphone or tablet at your disposal.

If you read any of the articles about the challenges at Atos Origin and thought you have the same type of problems in your IT organization, you might find this information on IT relevance engines useful.

If you're an existing xMatters client and have seen these benefits come to life at your company, feel free to share stories.

And finally, here's a Monday morning challenge:  If you record a video of yourself saying the following phrase (or a creative alternative), I'll make sure you get some awesome xMatters schwag for the holidays. Limited to first 20 responders who post as comments or to info@xmatters.com.

"If you're having notification problems I feel bad for you son, I got a relevance engine so I got none"

And yes, I realize that the grammatical structure of that phrase is far from perfect, but I have rules to comply with: Jay-Z 99 Problems

Abbas Haider Ali.

Yesterday we announced the release of the xMatters (IT Support) engine for CA Service Desk Manager.  You can get details in the official press release, but I did want to share some additional thoughts on what the integration means for CA SDM customers. 

In case you didn't already know it, we have a number of IT relevance engines that span a wide range of service assurance, service support, and service automation products from multiple vendors (complete list after the jump).  That means that as a CA customer, if you use other products as a Spectrum, Workload Automation AE (formerly Autosys), you can deploy multiple relevance engines that work in concert to get information to the right people at the right time, across multitple IT silos.  That combination looks something like this:

If you happen to be at Fusion 2011 this week, stop by the CA Booth (#418), ask for Desi or Brad, and have them walk you through how the IT support releveance engine can better connect the CA Service Desk Manager community (help desk, end users, Ops, infrastructure teams, etc.) together.  The end goal is of course to increase service quality, reduce the time it takes to resolve issues by bringing down response times, and make it so that you can access the info in SDM from any device, anywhere.

There's probably a few people who couldn't make it to Fusion, so for you we have details available on all of our integrations on our website. And yes, you can mix and match products from multiple IT vendors if you have a hetergenous IT management environment.

Abbas Haider Ali.