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Enterprise Management Systems: Compete or Compensate?

  

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Enterprise Management Systems:  Compete or Compensate?

In my last post I may have taken some liberty by linking Customer experience of interrupted or degraded service with existential angst.  Perhaps that was a reach.    

Bad experience is only one factor in the customer satisfaction equation.  Other factors of course are:  their perception of other options, their perception of the effort it takes to find and move to other options, their perception of value (cost/experience), their perception of the relative import of the service in question, and so on.

So, really there may be two other important things to realize/consider:

          ● Service Quality is contextual in that it is in relation to other market resident options – Competitive;

          ● Service Quality is contextual in that it is in relation to the other links you may have to your customer – Compensatory.

If these observations are true, then perhaps addressing these issues is a question of balance.  And to make balanced decisions, business leaders need to better understand their current state, their optional states, their ideal states, and the roadmaps leading beyond the status quo.

It’s not possible in this blog to speak to specific current state realities.  That would require the due diligence of an Assessment.  However, we can certainly look at some prevailing statistics and do a gut check on where we believe our enterprises sit relative to them.   On average:

                ● 6 out of 10 Network outages are caused by manual error;

                ● each device in the enterprise have 30 configuration errors;

                ● Almost 50% of your IT engineering resources are spent setting up the erroneous configurations or fixing them after they break.             

As I always ask my partner, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”  I’ll give you both:  we can treat these statistics as a Competitive reality, which can be exploited if we choose to rise above the mean.   Or we can stay under the bell curve and choose to compete in other ways (compensatorily).

 I’ll close today with offering one final statistic that may suggest you want to compete on this one, rather than compensate:  Investing (wisely, that is to say competently) in Enterprise Management Systems automation has shown a 625% Return on Investment rate.  So, it’s not only good Ops, its good business.

Rick Pandolfi