Sitting in traffic the other day reminded me of a stock trading company that gets millions of system alerts a day. Millions!!! Do they all need attention? Only some? How can you know without viewing them all? There is no way to personally handle such an enormous amount of alerts. To have someone sit and look through millions of messages a day and determine how critical the alert is or the validity of the alert is just impossible.
Then, a car went by in the Carpool Lane.
It occurred to me, that a business system is much like the carpool lane. The carpool lane allows vehicles with 2 or more people to be fast tracked past the traffic. Like the carpool lane, there need to be parameters that are able to identify which alerts are pertinent and allowed to speed through and which alerts are not. We’re not suggesting that some messages hop around others and get to us faster. That is of course, not workable. But, the system needs to be able to identify and process the alert types that are important enough to require immediate attention. Sometimes, the alert is as simple as a transient warning and doesn’t require immediate attention. Other times, the alert is much more important in nature, such as an application failure.