Tech Beyond Function

High Performance, slick design, perceived state of the art, everyone wants one.... Wonderful experience? Not always! A description of a British sports car I once owned. A great experience when it worked. Unfortunately, it was in the repair shop one-third of the time requiring many $$$$ to maintain. Too often we are tempted by the “WOW Factor” of technology. During design, the focus is on functionality, nothing exciting about dependability or flexibility. The technology is assumed to be operationally sound; however, there is no actual measure of business operation sustainability during the life cycle of the technology. No ongoing report card to identify the lemons. Just more dollars to sure up the defects.

Many tools and processes are implemented for technology operational monitoring and metrics. The monitoring is key to predict or minimize failures. The question is, how are the failures measured in the stats? What metric is being used for the business impact? The obvious tracker is service outages but what is the cost to the operation during those outages?

The fundamental disconnect is that IT may not “speak business ops” and doesn’t always understand the perspective gap. IT leadership is focused on strategic business advancement, successfully providing technology platforms for business to compete. While technology competitive edge is imperative to advance the business, there is not specific emphasis on designing the technology for reliability in the ongoing operations. Operational stability is an assumption not an architecture. The reliability due diligence is in selecting a market proven technology solution. Since technology and those that support it are not perfect, IT leaders accept a certain degree of collateral damage that comes with the territory.

The key to moving the needle towards true business operational excellence is to cultivate IT leaders that can shed their dominant technology lens and really measure from the business operations perspective. I welcome my colleagues on the IT side and more importantly those in the business operation to share their thoughts on ways to improve operations and close the gap………