Well Structured, Secure and Efficient Alert Notifications

Abstract

This thesis assembles and presents a set of organization generic, but alert notification specific recommendations. Recommendations any arbitrary organization may consider to establish and continuously improve well structured, secure and efficient alert notifications to relevant stakeholders. Alert notifications are only vaguely covered in traditional, generic and holistic change management, incident response and business recovery processes. Incident response, business (emergency) recovery, business contingency and crisis management is covered in general by several “best practices”, standards and recommendations. Relevant fragments can be drawn from some, but none of them provide detailed, specific recommendations as to how alert notifications can be used as a business beneficiary communication tool. Several organizations are required by law to alert notify authorities in certain situations and have developed their own solutions for the purpose. Solutions typically later improved and expanded, based on organizational experience gained, end user demands, expectations and requirements. Societal, corporate and governmental dependency of telecom and data services has been and is increasing. Increased dependency leads to increased expectations and demands towards service providers in general. The current general expectation is that telecom and data services are resilient, stable and available for use, at all times, everywhere. No matter how resilient, robust and secure these services are designed to be though, incidents will happen and they do. When they do, service providers are expected to handle them efficiently, professionally and in a predictable manner (including an expectation to keep relevant stakeholders informed). Alert notification is a simple communication tool that can support the service provider, keeping relevant stakeholders informed about the progress in a professional manner. Informed stakeholders are enabled to “workaround” occurred incidents and maintain “business as usual” more efficiently. Alert notifications also provide a common situational awareness amongst receivers, relevant to stakeholders expected to take more active action should the situation escalate further (e.g. members of internal crisis management team) and/or enable stakeholders to make more correct decisions (e.g. how long the undesirable effect of the situation can be endured before end user has to initiate own internal business recovery and/or contingency processes). The current and quite mature alert notification solution1 of the thesis topic provider, Telenor, is used as a case basis for the thesis. The current limited but publicly available relevant literature, combined with knowledge and experience collected from Telenor internal alert notification stakeholders and external expert contributors, is utilized by the master candidate, to provide a set of generic but alert notification specific recommendations, through this master thesis. The thesis is aimed to provide any arbitrary organization and stakeholders of the topic with thorough understanding of the topic. The thesis provided organization generic, alert notification specific set of recommendations, provides a basis for any arbitrary organization to establish and continuously improve well structured, secure and efficient alert notifications.