3 Key Mobile Device Uses For IT Professionals

Despite the fact that technical professionals spend most of their day working with technology, that doesn’t mean they’re on or around computers all day. As a tech professional you’ll just as easily find yourself traveling between three different locations in a single day as you will find yourself at your own desk.

During these circumstances, where you seem to be anywhere but your office, using your mobile phone or tablet can keep you on track and connected to what’s going on. Here are three ways you can start using your mobile phone or tablet if you’re not already.

Monitoring and Alerts

Many software and monitoring technologies today offer a way to use the software or receive alerts via your mobile device. For example, Ignite by Confio offers a feature called AlarmVM for their database monitoring software

Essentially, the software allows you to monitor and set up alarms, who those alarms should be sent to and how. Additionally, you can ignore an alarm if you see one of your coworkers has taken care of it.

Other companies offer help desk software that allows you to see and manage tickets from your mobile device. The BMC Track-It! Help Desk, for example, lets you login to the application from your phone’s browser.

Whatever software you use – database monitoring, help desk or something else – consider looking into applications that allow you to access it from your mobile device. It’ll keep you from worrying about anything going wrong and allow you to fix something without hijacking someone’s computer or having to return to your own.

Stay in Contact with the Team

It’s hard to stay in contact with your team if everyone is running in different direction (a common theme among IT teams). Texting or email allows you to stay in contact both on a personal and professional level. Additionally, you can use a chat function that allows the entire team to keep an ongoing thread up, both to share resources and to ask questions about issues and fixes for those issues.

Reminders

Ever feel like you’ve got so many things going that you can’t keep them all straight? A 2009 Information Management article reports that many IT teams are understaffed and overworked. Three years later and this is still true. Reminders can keep you focused so that you combat the biggest issues without forgetting about the smaller ones you need to come back to.

Depending upon your phone, you have a lot of options. You can keep a simple alarm clock reminder or find an application that offers more complex options. The choice is really up to you.

Conclusion

From my experience, IT professionals use their mobile device less than most other employees. It’s something akin to the doctor who hates to visit the hospital. But the reality is that a mobile device, and the software to go with it, really can help you increase efficiency and productivity. At the very least give it a try and see if it pans out. If it doesn’t you can always go back to the way you were doing things before.