InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 6, 1999
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While having clearly defined steps is useful, the pace of E-commerce is creating pressures so great that discrete steps are being compressed. At eBay, for example, Webb says he'll implement troubleshooting procedures concurrently rather than sequentially. It can take 30 to 90 minutes to switch to a backup system, and that's after spending considerable time deciding whether it would be faster to recover using the primary system. Rather than waiting to start the backup systems, Webb says procedures should be started early, noting that they can always be aborted at the last minute. "What you should do is start both of those in tandem," he says. "Decisions like that can save you valuable time."
But the pressure to move quickly can cause IT departments to forget about the people using their sites. CIOs who have experienced disasters say communicating with customers early and often is essential, and that involves communicating in plain English. On July 19, eBay posted this message on the "announcements" section of its Web site: "The CGI1 pool of servers is temporarily unavailable; this might cause error messages to be received while accessing some features on eBay."
The company has since dropped much of the technical jargon from its messages because customers don't care what caused the problem--they just want to know when the site will be back up.
Schwab, meanwhile, began a project in February to simplify its automatic system messages. About 20 people are involved in the project, and Hier-King says the new messages will be posted on its Web site starting this month. "You'll start to see more English words as opposed to technical terms," she says. "You shouldn't see `CGI' or `JavaScript error' in anything." While that may sound obvious, it actually represents a significant change in thinking. "It's a revelation that customers, and not just programmers, are using our systems," Hier-King says.
Discover Brokerage Direct, a unit of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Inc., has its customers in mind when hiring IT people. The brokerage has dual data centers in San Francisco and Sandy, Utah, that have hot failover capability. Discover usually hires operations people who are also licensed stock brokers, so they can take orders over the phone during any sustained problem with the Web site. Without such emergency backup, wait times on the phone would soar. "People get pretty hot under the collar after 25 minutes on hold," says Discover president Tom O'Connell. "You're under a microscope all the time."
Under a microscope, even the smallest imperfections get magnified. As many businesses have learned, that means you better have good crisis-management procedures in place before technical glitches become major business problems.
Illustration by John Bleck
Ticketmaster.com also has established escalation paths. "If a router goes down for one minute, this person is notified," Pleasants says. "It's very tightly scripted. The procedures are always changing and getting increasingly fortified." Things will get even more complex when the company adds a second Internet data center in Chicago over the next two weeks, to back up the servers at its Web facility in Los Angeles.
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The entire focus of crisis management has to be on the customer--because when a Web site falters, the damage can be greater than a failure of other IT systems. Terry Jones, CIO of Sabre Inc. and president of Travelocity, its online travel subsidiary, says Sabre's travel agents have long-term contracts, so they can't leave if Sabre has an IT problem. But retail customers are different. "If a Web site goes down, people just leave; they don't tell you," he says.
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Photo of Jones by Tom Gerezynski
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