As computers become critical to an ever-expanding list of business processes, customers are asking for 24/7 coverage more often. Although full three-shift coverage may be required in some organizations, some very simple ways to provide 24/7 coverage are not as expensive.
You can set up a voicemail box that alerts a pager when new messages arrive. The pager can be passed to various staff members on a rotation basis. The responsibility of the staff person may not be to fix the problem but to simply alert the appropriate person or keep calling various people until someone is found. This requires all staff to have a list of everyone’s home phone number.
A variation on this technique is to have all managers of the customer groups know the home phone number of the helpdesk’s supervisor, who then takes responsibility for calling SAs in turn until one is found. This has the benefit of spreading personal information around to fewer people but can wear down a helpdesk supervisor and doesn’t take into account the supervisor’s vacations. However, local solutions can be found, such as rotating this duty among a couple of supervisors.
You can also treat the issue the same way other industries treat fire and other alarms, because the modern equivalent of a researcher’s laboratory catching fire at night is a major file server being down. Always having a call list in case of alarms, fires, and so on, security personnel at factories start at the top of the list and keep calling numbers until they find someone. Depending on the issue, that person may tell the security guard whom to call.
No matter how SAs are contacted out of hours, the person must be compensated, or there is no incentive to fix the problem. Some organizations have a salary incentive for on-call time, equivalent to a fraction of the employee’s salary and time and a half if the person is called. Other organizations issue comp time1 either officially or unofficially.