ADVERTISING FEATURE NORLAND
Issue 8, Feb/Mar 10
How service partners can reduce operational risk in critical environments
By Tod Harrison, Norland Managed Services
One minute of downtime for a major credit card company’s network could represent $1.92 million in lost transactions (The Wall Street Journal)
The cost of service interruption for a typical financial institution is between €60,000 and €250,000 per minute (Hitachi Data Systems)
INPUTS
90% of businesses that lose data from a disaster are forced to shut down within two years (London Chamber of Commerce)
TYPICAL INPUT KPI
It is a commonly held misconception that a well-designed facility prevents outages or reduces overall risk to a negligible level. While it does help reduce certain risks, what it doesn’t do is prevent incidents resulting from human error. Poorly trained or inducted staff in a critical area can push the wrong button at a crucial time, consequently shutting down a facility. Research shows that up to 90% of critical incidents can be traced back to a fundamental failure in people and processes. This is a major source of systemic infrastructure outage for businesses.
The key question is what are you doing as a business to address the issues that can occur due to human error in a critical environment? Addressing underlying human factors could significantly improve your odds of avoiding critical service interruptions.
Traditionally the industry uses measures that give an indication of past performance. These often have little influence on the success of the critical processes that are undertaken in a critical facility and only record information after the event. Although these measures are important and must still be monitored the focus should be on driving input measures; measures which influence and will reduce the risk of outages.
Input measures are the drivers that ensure the successful operation of a mission critical facility and it is therefore essential they become part of a detailed measurement system. These measures should be formalised and should form the backbone of any contract between you and your service provider. These measures should be tangible, with a financial risk and reward element attached that is shared equally between service provider and customer.
The link between the input and output measures must be very clear, with an understanding by all parties about what is trying to be achieved at the mission critical facility - whether that be cost efficiencies or risk reduction. Relationships can and will break down if there is a lack of clarity between a service provider and the customers expected level of service delivery.
If we take the input measure of scenario training to illustrate the point, research has shown there is roughly a 50% chance of error if you are performing an unfamiliar task, at speed when you are not 100% confident of the desired outcome.
40
www.datacenterdynamics.com •Training Hours
•Scenario Training Hours •Staff Competence
•Engineering Near Misses •Risk Register •Attrition
•Ave Length of Service •Process compliance
Compliance TYPICAL OUTPUT KPI
•PPM completion •Reactive completion •Reactive Numbers •Breakdowns •Downtime •MTBF •Incidents
CRITICAL PROCESS
OUTPUTS
In stark contrast this risk drops substantially to only 0.04% when an often performed, familiar task is completed by well-trained and motivated individuals or teams. If a risk can be reduced by such a significant amount then it would seem prudent to secure a contractual commitment from the service provider to supply this type of training to all relevant staff.
What does this all translate to in terms of the risk to your facility?
Our research has shown that by focussing solely on the output measures, your risk increases over time with facility availability reducing and outages increasing – not a good profile for a critical facility! When the focus is put on input measures, our research shows that the risk to the facility can be significantly reduced, with greater availability and less outages.
With such a marked effect, it is essential for your critical environment that managing and measuring input measures is a fundamental part of any contract between you and your service provider.
The old adage of “what gets measured gets managed” is an old adage for a reason – It is generally true!!!
If you require any more details or wish to see an example of an input based measurement system then please contact: Tod Harrison - Business Unit Director Data Centres, Norland Managed Services Ltd
Email:
tod.harrison@norlandmanagedservices.co.uk Mobile: 07976 756 315
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