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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Operations Management vs Quality Management

One of the challenges Information Technology faces eternally is to:

a. reduce the operational costs of a system/application in production
b. improve the quality of system/application in development

They are inter related. If any company manages one of these areas perfectly, the other area is redundant.

Let us assume company A has a perfect operations management. They can operationally manage any sort of product implemented, let the product has unlimited bugs, the operational management process is so strong that the business is never impacted due to the bugs in the IT due to its efficiency of operations management process and techniques. This is a nirvana of IT Asset operations management. All the systems are proactively monitored, the capacity problems are predicted upfront and fixed before hitting the limit; all the business KPAs are always met that too within the limited budget of operations management.

Let us assume company B has a perfect quality management. Right from the architecture up till implementation all the quality processes are perfected and the product goes live with absolutely no defects. Once implemented there is no need for any operational management. Absolutely no monitoring is required, no performance issue will be there and no bugs to fix.

The "Perfection" in one of the areas means the "Redundancy" of the other area.

Company A's method of perfecting the operations is a "short term solution" until all the applications are replaced by Company B's method of perfect quality.

The FACT is, none of the today's corporates have patience to perfect any one of them. They concentrate on "improving" both the areas slightly in cycles. This attitude leads to never ending cycles of replacing the applications and continuing to spend a lot of money in maintaining them.

When the management starts to reduce the operational costs without any improvement of QUALITY of new IT implementations, the quality of operations will go down and impact the business KPAs.
So, sure method of reducing the operational expenditure is to Perfect the quality of IT systems/applications. That is the only way....