Adam Cohen and Bridget Pilloud - November 2002

A serious system problem is immediately visible to your customers, and it immediately impacts your company’s revenue. We used to be able to hobble along with parts of the system not working for a day or two, because the system didn’t directly interact with customers. Now system problems are real-time, with real business consequences. Every time a customer’s interaction fails, we directly impact that relationship. A downed system equals thousands of failed relationships and possibly millions of lost dollars.