Modern Middle Manager
Primarily my musings on the practical application of technology and management principles at a financial services company.
Running a PR Machine

Friday, January 07, 2005  

Rayne makes reference to the perception that internal clients have towards the IT department and whether I'm measuring the metrics that they care about. The answer is, "Sort of." We're a small company, and in a small company the end-user experience can be found pretty quickly by listening to the grapevine. What's the scoop? We're good. People are generally happy with the desktop experience. They aren't losing their documents, their systems aren't crashing (except in the case of hardware failure) and even the recent CRM upgrade hasn't really sent anyone over the edge. We've got a really positive image so far.

What about the back-end, where it all happens? Mostly good. We had approximately 46 hours of unplanned downtime during the year relating to our banking LOB. Fortunately, much of that impacted a subset of clients rather than all clients. It still counts against us, but at least it wasn't 46 hours of 100% failure. The way we calculate things around here it puts us at about 3 9's of service. Not great, but not awful, either. And no outage lasted greater than 2 hours. The average was about 15 mins.

Generally speaking, our internal and external clients don't notice us as much anymore. And I think that's great. Moving forward in 2005, we are going to take on training. It will turn out to be more than that, but the best part of training is the touchy-feely aspect of it all -- I have someone on staff who will be acting as the IT department's ambassador and probably doing it well. He's a people-person type of guy. The perception in the field will be that we care. And considering my budget, the amount of money we'll be spending for this is minor compared to the additional goodwill I expect to see us garner. So 2005 should be a really, really good year on all fronts.

posted by Henry Jenkins | 1/07/2005 02:52:00 PM

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