It is undeniable that IT has become an essential part of any organisation and IT teams are under constant pressure to provide 100% uptime.
Paige Francis is the CIO for IT Services at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn, shared that the reliance on IT meant that she expects downtime to “occur at the worst possible time” and is therefore important for IT teams to take pro-active rather than reactive steps to address downtime.
Wrote Francis at Information Week,
Users rely on absolute uptime, and when that connection is broken, panic sets in……Technology departments tend to have the bad reputation of exhibiting only reactionary behaviour, as if programmers and network admins were simply sitting on their hands and waiting for a notification that the email system is down. If you find yourself stuck in the rut of primarily responding to fires, your leadership needs to make a 180 — quickly.
The truly valuable technology departments have moved far beyond a role of simple service provider. You need to be better than that. Simple service is expected. However, as in Mario Brothers, you need to beat the simple-service-provider level to even think about higher levels like value, impact, transformation, and efficiency.
Francis added that “fury at a technical outage is similar to road rage” and IT teams should also teach users on how to manage this rage.
Wrote Francis,
You should teach your users to replace downtime frustration with busy work. Take a walk. Visit a colleague. Rearrange some files. There is plenty that you can do outside of the world of technology.
Francis’ final advice for IT teams?
Our end goals as technology leaders are to eliminate fear about technology, educate users, and promote efficiency. Being honest about downtime is step No. 1.
