24/7 business means 24/7 business (was Re: [LINK] Fwd: Census Config [Was: Personal comments on the eCensus form])

[Stilgherrian]

On 3/8/06 10:25 AM, "Glen Turner" <glen.turner at aarnet.edu.au> wrote:
> Also, there seems to be no escalation path for ISP helpdesks
> to level 2 support at the ABS.  I lodged a fault at 6pm last
> night and I'm still waiting for a response, 16 hours later.

Glen's comment reminds me that this is a problem faced by many, many
businesses, large and small, as they start "doing things online". They
simply forget that they need to support their end customers 24/7.

I'm guessing the ABS IT department is geared to supporting internal users --
who are presumably working business hours in their offices. A fault at 6pm
doesn't matter, they can look at it "first thing in the morning".

Now that they're exposing their systems to everybody, those customers could
be using their systems at any time. And especially for something like the
Census, I suspect the *majority* of users will be outside business hours.

A client of mine is a publisher of educational resources for teachers. When
their business was paper-based, then people would call during business hours
to order their products. It didn't matter if the clerical assistant was out
to lunch, the products still got mailed end of day.

Now they're distributing their products online, we're seeing teachers
downloading teaching materials at 10pm to prepare tomorrow's lesson. If they
have a technical glitch, they need support right then -- and that's
something a husband-and-wife business just isn't used to dealing with.

Stil


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