The Hard Truth About Supporting Converging Technologies
Posted on Fri, Jan 27, 2012
By Howard Podgurski
How do you support your variety of business applications and devices when they share resources and interact with each other?
The answer is: with the right expectations.
As hardware and software manufacturers advance the capabilities and functions of products like multifunction copiers and data management software, companies are eager to adopt the new technologies, sometimes without considering how these integrated technologies might be supported effectively.
By integrating automated capabilities into their workflow, companies find they can significantly streamline the human data entry input and outbound processes with the resultant benefits. Problems arise when one link in the variety of automated solutions breaks and the entire workflow process crumbles. Which application or device is broken? Who contacts the company responsible? How long will it take to fix things? Who makes sure the work is completed and re-establishes all the connections throughout the system?
CONSIDER THIS EXAMPLE
Just about every company has Exchange or POP email, an accounting package like Quickbooks, and a multifunction printer/copier/fax/scanner. Then, for example, a company purchases a VOIP phone system with a list of customers and a timer function, which sends a timer to the accounting system, which keeps track of services and auto-generates an invoice, which is then sent out through a fax machine.
In this situation it’s likely that multiple IT solution providers or manufacturers are providing support for the separate components. It’s also likely that if any linking of the devices or applications is being done by APIs or batch file programs, there is no single point of responsibility for managing the work flow process.
A further complication is when someone wants to make additions or deletions, these changes need to be cross-managed across all applications. In addition, upgrades to one application demand compatibility, alignment and continuity across all systems. Complete redundancy may be unrealistically expensive.
THE ‘IN-BETWEEN ZONE’
In an earlier blog post, I discussed best practices for supporting technology convergence, but what I didn’t address is how to support this integration when it occurs outside of these devices and applications.
I call this the “in-between zone” — an area for which no one is collectively responsible. In large organizations, support teams are built around the skills and processes needed to provide this coverage. Each device has a dedicated, expert support person, and a manager oversees all members of the support team. For most small and medium size companies, building this team in-house seldom justifies the return on investment.
UNSUPPORTABLE
Recently, here at DocuTech we implemented a cloud-based professional billing package for managed services. It integrated with our in-house managed Quickbooks application, which used an outbound multifunction device to fax invoices to customers. After a few months, we determined the process was completely unsupportable, a shipwreck waiting to happen, and we discontinued the program—clearly, it did not meet our expectations.
If the benefits of technology convergence are important to your business, then you need to understand the downside. Unless a solution is designed with complete redundancy and every, add, change or delete request is project managed, then unrealistic expectations of uptime will become the order of the day.
To be realistic, expect a four to six hour response time for problem resolution even when you are using the best managed service processes that are not supporting a fully redundant solution.
Approach the support of integrated devices and applications with clear expectations. Understand the pros and cons. Be realistic about supporting converging technologies.