Innovation doesn’t just happen… it evolves out of business desires and it frequently involves changing your own view of the IT value statement. This article focuses on one of the key components needed to make the shift from maintenance to an innovation IT philosophy, Business Service Reliability. As a progressive IT department you must understand exactly what it is, how you can manufacture Business Service Reliability in real time so that you can measure and report your contribution in business language, and how adopting the framework shifts your organization into an innovative business partner.
Because of our long-lived traditional IT department philosophies, most IT organizations, whether or not they realize it, focus almost exclusively on component availability rather than the overall reliability of their business services and the related customer interactions. The problem, of course, is that you can achieve decent availability metrics for individual tiers of IT services – but still wind up with customer interactions (the business services) that are unpleasant. And frequent painful customer experiences drive customers and their money away from your company. They cause your customers to say bad things about you… in public and online. They undermine your credibility, so that the business sees you as a maintainer of poor systems and an overall liability, not an innovative business partner. The shift to innovation starts with your customer, and understanding what gives them a good experience, and proactively transforming your operating model to manufacture what the customer wants.