Your systems will break—you decide what happens next
/Last week’s failure of VISA’s European systems caused widespread losses. It’s a prompt for you to check your own exposure.
We live in a world of systems—people and machines working together to make things tick. Most often, it's ok if something breaks and the damage is limited. But you need to identify your critical functions—places where a failure would cause harm to your customer experience, revenues, and reputation.
VISA has stated that their systems were brought down by hardware failure. This means that they had at least one single point of failure, much less likely that parallel redundant hardware failed at the same time. When that single point came down, it broke the vital chain that carries information about every credit card purchase across their network. The results meant buyers had to use cash, a competitors card, or not make the purchase. That last scenario hurts all of VISA's customers. All of those scenarios hurt VISA.
Critical chains like this need to be protected by providing backups. That means spare servers, network connections, software systems and people that ordinarily would be sitting by waiting for something to go wrong.
That last bit may cause business leaders to sniff a savings opportunity by avoiding the cost of redundancy. For critical functions, that's no different from avoiding the cost of insurance.
Or jumping out of a plane without a spare parachute.
Next time a chain breaks in your business, you'd best hope it's not critical.
Finding your critical links
Your business likely only has a few critical chains, processes that cannot break without causing you to lose face with your customer, and perhaps to lose sales and profits.
If you know what they are, pull up the list. (If you don't know, make that list right now.)
Sketch the steps in each chain and note which people and systems are required in order for that step to run. Systems provide people with processes and information; people make decisions and perform the steps. Both are critical.
Now list the backup people and systems you have at each stage.
If you find steps without backups, consider what you need to do to avoid costly failures. If you connect with me at graham@primeFusion.ca, I'll be able to give you some pointers.
... and if you missed these related articles, go back and take another look:
Mistakes happen—just don't blame the system