Make it Stop: Outages Out of Control

Each week seems to be worse than the last in terms of outages that are affecting leading B2C brands.  Whether it's the banking industry, web service providers or retailers, the severity and impact of being off-line is earning C-level attention, and not in a good way.

IT continues to talk about disaster recovery or application and infrastructure resiliency.  This is a disaster.  The focus of conversation should be about business process resiliency.  This is what customers and management care about.

The conversation needs to, and will, shift from IT service levels to business process service levels.  As this shift happens, the budgets of IT are likely to shift as well.

Smart, forward-thinking CIOs and VPs of Operations need to step up and drive this transition.  Punting the problem to 'the cloud' or avoiding the issue is a clear recipe for career change both in IT and in the business.  The career carnage being caused by these outages is avoidable, but leadership is required.

The boring topic of IT process management and automation is inevitably at the technological heart of this discussion.  Whatever the tools, vendors, strategies, organisations and plans – at its heart, IT must become Business Technology (BT) and therefore process, not widget, centric.

IT is already BT, but neither IT nor the business is prepared for this reality.  Hopefully, the news and dialogue in 24 months will be about the lack of outages and nothing like the last 12 months’ headlines.  We all have this hope.  Now we need a plan.