It’s easy to be cynical if you are an end user who relies on an IT (Information Technology) support organization. How many unplanned outage notices have you wondering if anything is going to be working today?
Frustrated, you send that e-mail to the CEO to get some attention on something that should have been fixed a decade ago. Interestingly, this touches off a pattern of waste that is repeated daily in organizations everywhere. Allowing pedestrian problems to ignite into full-blown all-hands-on-deck emergencies is completely avoidable. Sadly, it’s more the norm than the exception.
Even worse, real emergencies often go unrecognized while extraordinary effort is expended for ordinary gain.
If this happens frequently in your organization, isn’t it time to look beyond the fire fighting?
- Do you have chronic issues that are never completely resolved?
- Do the same people make the same mistakes unable to turn a lesson learned into a lesson remembered?
- Are resources stretched so thin that a satisfactory root cause analysis is omitted in order to fight the next fire?
- Is Executive Management seemingly oblivious to the perils since they often benefit from extraordinary effort exercises?
Breaking your organization’s dependency on fire-fighting as a normal reaction is not a quick-fix proposition. Finding a way to measure and report the cost of extraordinary efforts and contrasting them against the underwhelming, ordinary results they produce is a good first step.
Getting someone to act on that data is the real trick.
