Just as we question why Harry Potter needed an actual library with paper books vs some sort of computer/tablet device, in 2013 the concept that staffers are sitting at a desk watching a console is a somewhat antiquated concept.

First of all, this is VERY costly, and 99.99999% of the time they have nothing to do.

It's more common to assign some of these duties to a NOC, if there is one, but more commonly the regular IT security team is simply on-call, and setup to receive things like IDS alerts, SNMP alerts, or email events from devices they are responsible for. The incident response plan is there, and if a real incident happened, they need to be there, of course.

With two clicks of a Smartphone, a security analyist can connect to the network, view logs or alerts, and even start other processes, such as firing up a sniffer. There is no need to be there in person....