Senior Manager - IT Governance in Healthcare and Biotech2 years ago
It depends on the processes impacted. Also important to also present these figures as estimates.
Internal support processes may be quantified by using the average hourly wage/salary rate X the outage duration X the amount of people who were unable to perform the process.
Processes with a commercial impact, e.g., sales, could be quantified as above, along with any lost revenue...i.e., how much you average per hour in revenue generated by that process (or general, if you are unable to isolate it) X the outage duration. Depending on the exact system, financial systems could also potentially provide figures in terms of lost revenue.
Lastly, downstream impacts. If it was a really bad outage, it could have reputational, regulatory, and/or staff impacts. You could therefore look at loss of customers that exceed the norm, loss of employees that exceed the norm, and any fines/penalties resulting from it. Dollars can be assigned to these impacts by looking at loss of income from those lost customers, recruitment and training costs for replacement staff, and of course fines are straight forward.
Whenever quantifying impact, it is important not to focus on only one aspect, but look at the complete picture and add ALL the costs up.
Seeking advice on integrating embedded AI agents into Workday/SAP/etc. How do you handle integration across HRIS, ATS, and LMS? Do you rely on vendor-native tools or build your own in-house registries?
It depends on the processes impacted. Also important to also present these figures as estimates.
Internal support processes may be quantified by using the average hourly wage/salary rate X the outage duration X the amount of people who were unable to perform the process.
Processes with a commercial impact, e.g., sales, could be quantified as above, along with any lost revenue...i.e., how much you average per hour in revenue generated by that process (or general, if you are unable to isolate it) X the outage duration. Depending on the exact system, financial systems could also potentially provide figures in terms of lost revenue.
Lastly, downstream impacts. If it was a really bad outage, it could have reputational, regulatory, and/or staff impacts. You could therefore look at loss of customers that exceed the norm, loss of employees that exceed the norm, and any fines/penalties resulting from it. Dollars can be assigned to these impacts by looking at loss of income from those lost customers, recruitment and training costs for replacement staff, and of course fines are straight forward.
Whenever quantifying impact, it is important not to focus on only one aspect, but look at the complete picture and add ALL the costs up.