The Hub Commentary  __

A tweet pointed me to this post today and what a great post and analogy.  I, in fact, kick off most presentations by stating Business Service Management is EASY!  In fact, you hold the key to the most valuable insurance policy in your company.  Business runs on technology, it is commodity, like electricity, we count on it being there to conduct business.  I have a previous post on just that insurance policy in hurricane season on the east coast of the United States where the call center becomes the hub of activity for the power companies.  Customers phone in outages, crews are dispatched  and power is restored more quickly with better monitoring of the technology supporting the call center and dispatching crews.  Technology cannot stop an impending natural disaster, like a hurricane, it contains the effects of the natural disaster as described in the linked to post.

As with the oil spill that my friend JP references, early warning can aid to avoid an event or contain the event as was the case with the the power outage in the North Eastern US a few years ago.  This CIO once told me it took only 8 seconds for that outage to cascade from Ohio to the east coast.   Avoiding it at that stage was not possible, containing it becomes the goal.  After the event as JP describes, they implemented a monitoring system that correlated data from their grid monitoring system with their technology management tools for that complete picture to avoid events by reading the early warning signals and better contain events when they do occur.  An article is posted here describing the integrated approach this electricity operator took, just as JP describes.

I work with companies every day to justify the insurance policy we know of as Business Service Management.  In tough economic times when spending is reduced, justifying a spend becomes difficult when it is not reducing costs directly.  The cost of the approach and tools is far smaller (even when maintained over time) than the disaster of an outage or spill.

Can your company afford a game of high stakes poker when it depends on technology to operate?

Michele

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The Gulf oil spill of April 2010 was an unprecedented disaster. The National Oil Spill Commission’s report summary shows that this could have been prevented with the use of better technology.  (Read Full Article…)