MNP’s Technology Consulting team will be speaking on ways to safeguard your business from the direct and indirect costs of a Go Live failure at the upcoming CIO Peer Forum, April 20-21, 2016 in Toronto.
Today’s Chief Information Officers (CIO) are facing a more complex set of risks at the ‘go live’ stage than ever before. With a shift from internally-developed systems to customer-facing, browser-based, mobile-friendly systems from third parties, CIOs and their IT departments must be prepared to meet user expectations with seamless deployments and stable ongoing performance.
But what happens if your deployment fails? Think about recent high profile nightmarish technology rollouts – like the U.S. federal government’s Healthcare.gov – not to mention all those that aren’t reported on.
It’s clear that a performance failure can have direct costs for your business. Downtime for a platform can result in lost sales, plus fees associated with investigation, remediation and purchasing new hardware to compensate for a technology rollout’s shortcomings.
But just as important are the ways a performance failure can indirectly cost your business. Below are four hidden ‘costs’ every CIO should keep in mind.
Lost Customers – If your platform isn’t working as intended you may not even hear about it. Only 4% of users complain about poor service – 90% of those who don’t complain will leave and never come back.
Employee Dissatisfaction – A company’s corporate intranet and internal web applications have been ranked as two of the top three biggest performance challenges by businesses. In fact, 70% of workers in one U.S. study reported feeling disengaged from their company as a result of its software, resulting in an estimated cost of over $2,000 per employee per year in lost productivity and reduced efficiency.
Support Costs – Cutting corners during “go live” planning may save you money in the short-term but it can often be costly in the long run. We all know it’s better and more cost-effective to get something right the first time instead of fixing it after the fact. Some numbers put the cost per hour of downtime as high as $40,000 – if not higher. What is the cost to your business to lose a customer and try to attract them back?
Legal & Liability – High profile failures and data breaches easily make headlines in today’s wired world – damaging your brand’s reputation, sometimes permanently. In addition, legal action for failing to protect sensitive information in a data breach results in additional financial costs and damage.
“Go Live” failures typically come down to three scenarios:
- Failure to plan
- Failure to prepare
- Failure to protect
It’s important that all three of these are addressed with every technology initiative to ensure you’re not living every CIO’s worst nightmare by encountering a major failure at launch.
MNP’s Technology Consulting team will be speaking on ways to safeguard your business from the direct and indirect costs of a Go Live failure at the upcoming CIO Peer Forum, April 20-21, 2016 in Toronto.
The workshop on Thursday April 21, 1:20 – 2:50pm, CIOs Guide to Avoiding “Go Live” Nightmares, will be facilitated by Scott Greenlay, National Director, Technology Consulting Practice, MNP LLP, Michael Aldor, Senior Manager, Technology Consulting, MNP LLP and Andre Buisse, Senior Manager, Technology Consulting, MNP LLP.
