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Good morning. Welcome to another video blog by Fortress Technology Planners. Today we are going to continue
our series on the IT industry. In fact, we are going to
continue an earlier video blog where we talked about IT risk. As we discussed in the previous
video, risk is broken down into the probability of that risk event occurring and the impact. We
talked about how IT risks are high in both probability and also impact. We talked about
a couple of the risks that you might be exposed to related to solutions that you select and
also hiring IT staff. We are going to continue this video today focusing a little more on impacts of those
risks and we are going to start with turnover of your IT staff. Turnover is very common IT. You do see IT
professionals moving from one company to another on a more frequent basis and perhaps professionals
in other areas might do. Turnover is very costly to you. Your systems are likely very complex.
Depending on the state of your documentation and how up-to-date that information is, it
can take a long time for a new staff member to get up to speed on your environment, really get
a good grasp of what's going on there and become efficient and effective at supporting
you. Unfortunately, a year or two down the road they could can be gone and you could be starting that cycle
all over again. There's an uncertainty to that staffing, the turnover issues that arise
from that. What about the timing of this? Depending on when that person moves on and the disruption involved
with that new person coming in, is happening at the same time as your AGM? Is it happening
at the same time as your planning for you're seasonal business? Perhaps in the summer when you have a lot of
people on vacation and it's a little more difficult to hire a new person. This is
definitely risk to watch for is all issues that relate to your IT staff. The most common risk
that we see impacting businesses in terms of IT are issues with equipment. You choose the correct
solution, you choose the correct equipment, you purchase that equipment and bring it in to your environment.
You intend to use the solution for only three years. Maybe something goes in your favor
and that solution works well for you and you carry on using it into fourth-year into the
fifth year of operation. That's great news! If you managed to make use of your solution
for couple years longer than you planned to and it is still being effective for you then you
have certainly made a savings there and that's impacting your bottom line in a positive sense. However, we sometimes
see if those solutions go out of warranty. We see that those solutions require parts that are no
longer even available. This is something that is a little but different about the IT industry,
that business stakeholders are not used to. Your truck,
if it goes out of warranty, there are still parts available for it. There are still a number of people who are able
to support it, and get those parts and help you resolve any issues that may occur with it.
But if you have a five-year-old piece of equipment, like a server, and you need a part for that one
it may no longer exist. This is a shocking thing to many business stakeholders. Unfortunately
they learn this lesson the hard way. Your equipment has a failure, you need to repair it, parts aren't available and
you've now entered into a disaster situation. This can be very costly to you. Managing
the risks associated with your equipment, understanding where you stand in terms of
warranties, in terms of available parts, how are these things functioning, your preventative maintenance
to prevent that the failure from occurring in the first place, all the things that relate
to your equipment and systems. Where do you stand in terms of risk on those things? We can't have a discussion
of the risks involved with IT, without addressing really special point on impact. The impact to you
when you have a major IT issue is severe. We are talking about the lost productivity
of your staff that can add up very, very quickly, depending on the rates you're your people. The opportunity
cost in terms of lost business that you're not able to recoup. Worst of all these potential
impacts is the loss of data. A large proportion of organizations who experience significant
data loss within one or two years are actually out of business. That is shocking to consider, but if you
think about it, it really make sense. How many people hours of effort is involved with all that data
that you have on your IT system? It can be very quickly tens of thousands of hours, hundreds
of thousands of people hours that are involved with that information. If that information is ever completely lost many
businesses simply can't recover from that situation. This is the most extreme case, but even on a smaller
case: the loss of a few files, loss of productivity, these are major impacts to your organization.
From a risk perspective, please remember that IT is highly involved with risks. We
have very high probabilities, a lot of things that can go wrong. We also have very, very
high impacts, significant negative effects to you if any of these events do occur. This has been Jonathan
Nituch with Fortress Technology Planners. We are an IT planning company in Calgary,
Alberta. We will speak you tomorrow.