You just received a phone call from one of your customers complaining they can’t get to your website. You my friend, have an IT emergency on your hands! There is a pretty good chance IT has already gone into action because they received an automated alert or received a call from someone else about the issue. Your IT team works very hard to keep your networks and computer systems running properly. At least that has been my experience over the years. It is not uncommon during an outage to see them working 24×7 with no breaks to get your systems back online. It can be a thankless job in these difficult situations. And there is certainly no lack of care or effort on their part. Regrettably some IT teams really miss the mark when an outage occurs because they get so focused on fixing the issue and lose site of why they have a job in the first place.
Companies only exist to deliver some product or service to their customers. What it takes to make that happen is of no interest to the customer, nor should it be. When a major IT outage occurs, it will affect your ability to deliver product and service to the customer, yet some IT teams do not concern themselves with that. Rather, they focus on the technical issue and its resolution. I know some IT folks reading this will call foul saying “It’s not our job to deliver product and service to the end customer. We were hired to manage and maintain IT stuff.” I must respectfully disagree.
It is everyone’s job in any company or organization to continuously help to insure success in delivering product and service to the end customer – IT is no exception. During an emergency, some IT teams will immediately go after the broken stuff but are nowhere to be found in the conversation about how we are going to deliver to the customer during the outage (E.g business continuance).
Your IT needs to have a procedure in place that outlines the steps to be taken in case of an emergency or major outage for all of your critical systems. Granted that in the case of a website outage, there are simple steps IT can take to reroute users to a backup site (if you have one). Unfortunately, not all emergencies are the same. Some will not have an obvious or predetermine work-around, so you will not know how to handle it the moment it happens. Keeping this in mind, IT must have an emergency procedure which includes steps focused on business continuance, not just issue resolution. I have always taken the approach to enlist two IT staff members, sending one to fix the issue and the other to find a good work around. I don’t care if it takes duct tape and staples, the first one done is the winner! We can figure out how to get back to normal later.
Make sure IT is part of the equation for business continuance during an emergency and your company can weather the storm no matter what happens. I would also remind you to take a minute every now and then to thank your IT personnel for all of the good work they do.