Why 99.999% Availability May Mean 100% Poor Customer Experience

Why 99.999% Availability May Mean 100% Poor Customer Experience

IT is fascinated with availability

The Five Nines of Availability

• 90% availability - 36 days/864 hours downtime per year

• 99% availability - 9 hours downtime per year

• 99.99% availability - 1 hour downtime per year

• 99.999% availability - 5 minutes downtime/year

But is availability really the right measure of IT success?

• Consider…

Reliability: Which plane would you rather fly?

• A jetliner with a decade of experience, or a totally new design?

• Both airplanes offer high availability. But one has problems with batteries that catch fire.

• An unreliable system can actually hurt you more than one that is not available…

Accuracy: Would you want to fly on this plane?

Accuracy is just as important as availability.

Why measuring availability is not enough

A company set up its website as the place for customers to order their products.

It wasn’t working…

The call center knew it, but IT didn’t

All day long, every day of the week, the company’s call center was being overwhelmed by customer calls complaining about the slowness of the website.

It wasn’t available, it wasn’t performing, and customers were

having a hard time using it. Yet IT had no idea there was a problem.

Why IT missed the problem

• Component availability was great…

• People were making their bonuses!

But what the customer saw

was the result of all 150 components working together…

And it was rare to have everything

working all at the same time.

The failure of mathematics...

There was math for component availability, but that wasn’t telling the

whole story.

Are there mathematics for determining a good customer experience?

A monument to reliability and accuracy

We can look to the worlds of engineering and manufacturing for our inspirations.

Take the Eiffel Tower.

The base of the Eiffel Tower is four separate pedestals

…each of which was built by four separate work crews.

The work of the four teams had to align perfectly.

Putting the pieces together

How were they able to take 18,038 individual pieces of cast iron and build something that has withstood the test of time?

They had blueprints, and they also had math. All You Need to Know about the Eiffel Tower, http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/images/PDF/all_you_need_to_know_about_the_eiffel_tower.pdf, The Official Website of the Eiffel Tower

Just as important as the blueprints was the math

Eiffel, his engineers, and his builders had mathematics to determine that what they were building was accurate and reliable enough.

This formula measures the probable response of a structure when it feels movement.

We need to think of IT in the same way

We have to have a vision of where we’re taking our business service—the blueprint for what we are building—and we have to have mathematics that show us how to create a reliable structure.

Because what IT manufactures is user experiences.

Are you manufacturing good user experiences?

Read the new eBooklet,

If My Availability Is So Good, Why Do My Customers Feel So Bad?

and learn how:

• To use hard mathematics to improve your customers’ experience.

• The reliability and availability of your IT infrastructure connects to your business.