As much by writing

Back in July I posted to the “As Much By Writing” blog a screenshot captured from my computer when Google was down. By posting this, I was trying to highlight even technology giants–those universally accepted as leaders and innovators, and who have relatively unlimited resources compared to SUNY Delhi (technical, financial and staff)–can run into issues that cause service interruptions. However, rather than elevating CIS’ status by promoting Google’s failings (sort of the “Ha! See they mess up too!” argument), I was a hoping to foster some consideration about how we define acceptable service levels. That is, is there a difference in the users’ willingness to accept Google’s service interruptions and what those same users would be willing to accept with locally managed services and systems?  Essentially is satisfaction based on evidence (actual business needs for capacity, availability, performance, etc. ) or perceptions (personal preferences, or relative resourcing, or prestige of the organization, or something else) ? If it is the former, than service quality (and thus satisfaction) should be measured against how disruptions have impacted the business processes and objectives of the functional or business unit that relies on the service or system. If it is the latter, I do not believe there is any way to measure the quality of service offered by a support unit, as the metrics (and thus satisfaction) will always be subjective.

This same discussion was initiated by Brian Voss,  Vice Chancellor for Information Technology & CIO, Louisiana State University and A&M College in the EDUCUASE CIO Constituent Group listserv:

I returned from a short trip today – having been off campus for a couple of days during which we had the longest email outage in my tenure at LSU.  I expected mass hysteria and repercussions.  I picked up our student newspaper this morning (and yesterday’s) expecting a front-page lambasting.  To my utter shock and dismay … nary a word!

Well, except for an interesting editorial by a student columnist, discussing the battle ‘for student love’ between Google and Microsoft.  This op-ed, published in the shadow of this week’s Google outage was tagged with this comment:  “TigerMail runs much more smoothly, aside from occasional prolonged downtimes, now that it is run by Google.”

To paraphrase my good friend Pete Siegel – how interesting that if Google has an outage, it must be a major unforeseen problem that really must be complex (and thus understandable) ; but if a campus IT-served email service was similarly impacted, it’s a sign the CIO is incompetent.To further illustrate that point, the very last line after the aforementioned editorial was:  “Now if only LSU would outsource Moodle to Google as well.”

Indeed.  Of course, we do outsource our instance of Moodle – but apparently, that company doesn’t command the respect (and forgiveness!) of Google.

I think there is an interesting discussion to be had about how the perception of an organization (e.g. an IT department) affects service expectations and satisfaction. Are we using less than objective metrics?