Neglecting your IT processes is as bad as neglecting your customer.
In yet another example of how customers are impacted by even the most mundane details in IT, the Oculus Rift was rendered unusable by a recent certificate expiration.
If your products or services depend on certificates, make sure you have a new employee process workflow that manages, automates or at the very least alerts teams when they need to be updated. Something as simple a calendar can solve this problem.
When looking at TechCrunch’s article on the outage it’s also pretty clear that a secondary process is also required. Updating customers when you do fail! Several customers noted that the support site wasn’t updated even after Oculus was aware of the issue.
Product and Service owners take note; your products and services are only as good as the processes that support them.
One solution we use to avoid these problems is a simple “robot” that reminds us to regularly check things we could easily forget. It simply creates tasks every week/month/quarter to teams that manage specific elements of our business.
Another solution we provide is the ability to quickly kick off processes without knowing how to fulfill them. In this case, creating a critical request for customer impact would create tasks for marketing to communicate the outage, support to update any customer-facing knowledge bases or site and a task to development to resolve the issue.
The final solution we provide customers is a simple discussion format for critical incidents like these. It should be easy for teams to invite whomever they need to resolve an issue and provide a single point of conversation so that everyone can be informed on the progress toward resolution.
Cassy Lueneburg