API Digital’s Hot Five: Top Tech Topics from 2012

2012 was a productive, prosperous, and humbling year for API Digital. We would like to take a few minutes to say thank you to our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook followers and express our sincere appreciation to our blog readership for actively joining in our conversations last year.

You encouraged us as we sought new ventures, and challenged us to provide you with simple and revolutionary ways to solve the network problems that are most important to your business.

We took a look back at our conversations over the last 365 days and came up with our five most talked about technology topics of the year.            

#5: Jumpstarting your IT department. Our fifth leading topic of the year came from our first blog leading into 2012. IT departments face increasing workload due integration of technology into the core business function. Meanwhile, IT department managers are under constant pressure to cut costs and increase productivity. We took a look at ways to maximize your investment and decrease risk. Considering lean IT principles brought to light the value of eliminating or outsourcing tasks that distract or delay project implementation.

#4 The value of colocation. Continuity of operations is key. In the event of a disaster, we found that it is possible to recover--sometimes before the event becomes service impacting--when you:

1. hire the right people who act quickly
2. focus on policy and accuracy
3. have a well defined plan
4. carefully follow detailed procedures

#3 Forward thinking help desk and technology support. We considered the true cost of in-house support and discussed how eliminating transfers, minimize wait times, and finding smart solutions help improve customer satisfaction and employee productivity.

#2 Our first runner-up topic focused on proactive vs. reactive network monitoring. More specifically, a lot of you were not only interested in discussing what technology endpoints need to be monitored, but also the methodology for responding to network issues (proactive vs. reactive approach). We found that a reactive approach can be costly due to loss of revenue and employee downtime. An effective proactive approach to monitoring relies on three action steps:

1. Watch
2. Respond
3. Resolve

The common theme of each of our network monitoring discussions was: systems do not solve network problems, people do.

Regardless of how much you invest in monitoring software, equipment, and data center accessibility, having the right people actively responding to issues at the earliest stage possible best results in continuity of business operations. This year, join in our conversations:

• Building a stronger network for businesses with multiple locations across the country
• The point when monitoring becomes a workday distraction: unnecessary alarms and rapid escalation processes
• Where and how: network monitoring for IT project planning

#1 The number one technology topic for API Digital in 2012 is:

IT Management Challenges and Best Practices

Infrastructure and operations (I&O) managers faced a lot of challenges in 2012. They withstood the demand to “do more with less” resources. In the meantime, IT complexity increased due to continuous technology integration as well as the phasing out of old systems, replaced with new ones. It was noted how easy it is to focus on the system itself and make lean IT principles and value demonstration an afterthought.

Our leading conversations on the subject of IT management drew hundreds of viewers that led to numerous comments throughout our various social media platforms: Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Thank you for joining in our conversations on today’s business technology management and customer service improvement. We invite you to join us again this year as we dive deeper into the challenges and rewards that come from business technology management.

  

Here’s a sneak peak at what to expect from API Digital in 2013:

• Revealing your OASIS: Discovering your full operations and support potential
• Understanding your connectivity personality: What kind of bandwidth user are you? 
• What exactly are you getting (and giving up) by moving to the cloud?
• Changes and challenges for the Telecommunications industry in 2013
• Tips for seamless connectivity for multiple business locations

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