I’m always surprised by the difference in pain thresholds between companies.  One company will put up with all sort of terrible atrocities in their infrastructure and never say a word.  Another company will raise hell the moment a printer doesn’t work.  I suppose this is a matter of culture, but what is that actual impact on the business?  The Emerson-Ponemon Institute found that each minute of unplanned downtime costs business an average off $5,000.  And since the average outage is 90 minutes the total cost per outage is $450,000.  This is of course spread across all business sizes, but you get the idea.  It’s expensive.   Technology Pain Threshold. 

But what about issues that don’t take your business down completely?  What about the issues that are just a nuisance and cause your staff to be less productive?  How do we measure those instances?  At Leverage we measure those with a certain type of ticket.  For us, those are Priority 2 tickets.  This means that a person is not able to perform their job function.  We simply take the number of those tickets per year and add the total time to resolution to determine the amount of time and, ultimately production, lost to technical issues.  Our reports show that new clients average 11 hours of lost employee productivity because of technical issues per month.  We are able to reduce that number to less than one hour within 90 days.  

The biggest contributor to lost productivity is inaccurately configured equipment.  Most equipment is acceptable with some obvious exceptions.  However, most equipment is only partially configured.  And almost all infrastructures are haphazardly pieced together in order to just keep things working.  This methodology is flawed.  If you can see that 11 hours per month are lost to poorly operating systems and the average pay rate is $50,000/yr then your company loses about $250 per month on employee downtime alone.  That doesn’t account for the lost production which depends on how much revenue your company produces.  If a company chooses the cheap option for a network switch at $300 instead of the business class option at $1,200 then it’s easy to see how quickly that savings is lost to downtime.  

Most companies allow issues to continue unchecked in their environment because they don’t understand the financial impact it has on their business.  We at Leverage make it our primary focus to always consider the business impact of all technical decisions.  To learn more about keeping your business fully operational make sure to read our Essential Guide to Business Continuity.  Feel free to contact us if we can help you eliminate your pain.  

Technology Pain Threshold

Technology Pain Threshold Technology Pain Threshold Technology Pain Threshold Technology Pain Threshold