-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Andrews Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 11:14 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: FW: Fatuities (was 'Another BIG mainframe . . . ')
On Fri, 2006-09-08 at 11:32 -0400, Thompson, Steve (SCI TW) wrote: > BTW - I keep telling managers, my job is to make IT BORING. Yes, that's our job -- but it's terrible PR. Every time you pick up a telephone handset and hold it to your ear there's dial tone. It's a constant, something you expect without question. And nobody appreciates it. No one thinks about the high technology supporting that dial tone: the redundant switches and pathways, the excess capacity, the skilled workforce always staying a step ahead of Murphy. We quietly do our jobs, keeping our systems running 24x7, providing our variant of "dial tone" -- and we are as invisible as the Bell System folks. But when a MS-Windows server crashes, watch the accolades roll in when the PFCSKs reboot it. "What would we do without these guys? They've saved the day again!" Firefighters are glamourous heroes. You're just another expensive body. <SNIP> I had a former IBM hardware sales guy come up with a very interesting thing when he had become the Operations Manager (actually, ALL operations issues reported to him, including applications and systems programming, but he was not the CIO). He started reporting system down time, unscheduled outages and percent available. And since the accounting dept had somehow put a $$ cost per minute of unscheduled down time during "prime time", he reported lost revenues as a result. Made that dial tone support become REAL visible real fast. Then he started reporting on what the end result would be after a DR test when xxx system could not be restored in the time given -- In projected lost revenues. Made that reliability stand out like GOLD. Perhaps things like this should start showing up in our respective status reports? Later, Steve Thompson ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
