Making the invisible visible

Posted January 5, 2012 at 4:00 pm by Quintijn Knepper in General.

When your car is not running, you realize how nice it is when it does work. When you hurt a muscle at sports, you notice just how many activities or movements require that muscle. When your washing machine breaks you find out how crucial it is, and when your shower blocks you know you have a big problem.

The strange thing is: when your car is running, your muscles are doing what they’ve been designed for, your washing machine does works and your can take a shower every day you will stop experiencing it as something that is still special, it simply becomes a commodity. These things need to be there and you expect it to work whenever you are in need of the functionality.

When put in perspective of platform management a fully functional and performing platform could easily become experienced as a commodity as well. So whenever a problem does occur it will be perceived as a huge dissatisfier and it becomes the task of the platform management company – us – to take responsibility in coordinating efforts to solve the problem.

This continuous journey is one of our biggest challenges: because we take responsibility of the end of your complete IT chain, we become more visible to whenever there is an incident. Our solution method is based on three simple rules:

1. Solving the problem, no matter what
2. Finding out what the problem triggered
3. Making the invisible visible

Our technical teams and overall approach is fully based on structured and ad-hoc supporting of your  business critical IT platforms, so when there is a problem our times to respond and solve are very important and therefore short.
Parallel to solving the issue we will always do an analysis to the cause so we can find out what caused the incident and what and/or who was the real problem creator is. From multiple perspectives that’s an important aspect in the process. One of them is obviously to learn from situations in the past but during the solving process it is important to know if we are the solving party (and the cause) or assisting the solving party. It creates differences in project management, governance, resource management, consultancy and of course invoicing.

But if you don’t look for the real problem owner, risks could be that multiple parties with different agenda’s are looking into the same problem. And this could end up in a blurry situation: who is in the lead, who decides, who is paying, who provides project management,  who can set priorities, who is setting the time-lines, who manages communication with suppliers etc.

Then, when all problems are solved the other hard part starts over again. Because, similarly to your car that isn’t running anymore or the shower you can’t take whenever you like, these situations can affect you overall perception of that car and shower. By default it should also be affected by the times it does work. From a commercial perspective it is important to raise the awareness about how fantastic it is, when it does work the way you want to. We basically need to make the invisible visible.

All the days that your IT is running smoothly should be celebrated. Even though at Jitscale almost all of our customers have enjoyed an up-time of up to 100% for the last 12 years, we should celebrate that up-time everyday because it is something we are very proud of. And this should not only be from Jitscales perspective, but also from all the other partners in the IT chain, including your own IT department and your customers using the systems.

We try to increase visibility by making graphs about the up-time, focusing also on performance because up-time isn’t the whole story of the customer experience. In addition we try to advise or customers pro-actively about steps to make, parts to upgrade and potential future threats that could happen.
But we’d like to learn from our customers, potential customers and relations, so from you. What do want to hear? What information would you like to be informed about? Which details would you want to see in graphs? What do you not want to see? Are you using the monthly reports for yourself of are you using them to inform others? What do they want to see in there? Please let us know, and we’d love to get that provided to you.