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How Should CIO Deal With Failure Management?

2008/9/17 8:53:00 41868

A sudden disaster caused a large food production enterprise to face a crisis: because of the great changes in market supply and demand caused by the earthquake, the sales director of the food company began to panic, because all the sales plans before were overturned.

In order to ensure that the performance figures are not as poor as possible, he has to use all kinds of possible "humanized management".

With his acquiescence and influence, more business personnel carried out this practice, and all kinds of rules and regulations under normal operation were left idle, and the process began to become a mess.

Two months later, a management crisis began to spread in enterprises.

This phenomenon angered the chairman of the board. First of all, it was CIO Liu Qiang: "when the system is online, you promise that the advantage of the IT system is that it can make the process management more optimized and the management more standardized.

But why do you have such a big management crisis when your system does not have problems?

In the face of problems, any excuse is counterproductive.

Liu Qiang knows that although the initiator of this crisis is not the IT system, IT system can only assume the responsibility of reconstruction now, because the IT system is duty bound as a tool for sorting and optimizing the process.

But in a situation similar to a mess, can Liu Qiang thoroughly examine how much damage and change this chaos has caused to the IT system itself?

How can he make use of the IT system to sort out the priorities of each business node?

Clear thinking is the key.

To achieve this, the premise is to monitor the whole business process in real time.

This leads to the concept of business continuity management.

Many CIO are not new to business continuity management. Generally speaking, it covers the business risk domain of information technology services.

However, accidents and failure management caused by non information technology factors should also be attributed to the management objectives of business continuity management.

In the face of the dilemma of failure management, if the information technology service can be separated from the business process conveniently and reliably, then the role of information technology service management and business continuity management role can also be taken by one person, which provides scientific basis for CIO to solve the failure management.

We know that many information technology functions have never been described in the "information technology service" model. IT system builders still need to retain their consistent tradition and focus on infrastructure, applications and systems.

For such information technology functions, they may know that "a system has been delayed", but it is not clear what the whole set of services provided by the system is.

From this perspective, this phenomenon also leads to the fact that CIO is accustomed to treating all information technology services as equals, and there is no difference between priorities and service levels among services.

For example, what information technology services will be affected if the communication failure affects the system?

Can CIO have a clear idea?

Therefore, from the information technology service to the information system, we must establish a complete corresponding relationship.

After the comprehensive assessment of information technology services is completed, weaknesses in the continuity of information technology services can be revealed.

We can find the continuity points and breakpoints of the system continuity in order to make the CIO rationally treat the old IT system in the face of failure management, achieve targeted and do not mess up the IT system because of the confusion of business management.