What do VHS players and Tamagotchis have in common with the pager? It’s simple, they’re old pieces of technology that were popular in the ‘90s. It’s no longer the “Saved by the Bell” years and doctors need to get with the times by ditching their hammer pants, fanny packs … and pagers! By saying goodbye to the pager, doctors can adopt a more secure, clinical communications solution that’s equipped to handle all 21st century hospital demands.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of scientist mice built a mega-computer named “Deep Thought” to Answer “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” After 7.5 million years, the machine produced “42.” At PagerDuty, we did something similar, except we didn’t have scientist mice or wait 7.5 million years.
If you’ve ever been on call, you know that the incidents don’t stop because you have the flu. Or when you’re attending your child’s high school graduation. Or, as I found out firsthand, even when you’re at your own wedding. Confucius once said, “If you have never had a major occasion happen while you are on call, then you may not have ever lived.” (Okay, I totally made that one up.)
There are a number of reasons why email is predominately used to manage an incident. Everyone usually has access to email and the email technology has already been “paid for”. Therefore it’s easy to think of email as being a cheap resource that’s easy for MSPs to use. But easy isn’t always best…or even appropriate.
What’s A Flat On-Call Structure? A flat on-call structure is an on-call schedule that has multiple people getting notified of the same incident at the same time. There’s no escalations, no hierarchy, no layers.
