High capability: it is not a simple "technical job"

In terms of capability evaluation, the most effective way to improve "fault time" and "system recovery time" is to speed up human reaction according to the standard management process.

Narrowly defined, "high capability" refers to the reliability of computer system, which is to shorten the downtime caused by daily maintenance operation and sudden system collapse; in broad sense, it contains the contents of responding speed, service quality and data security. With the upgraded level of domestic enterprises' informationization, the daily business relies more heavily on IT systems. IT systems and "high capability" of core applications gradually become the vitals of the operation and growth of enterprises' businesses.

Particularly in the service industries with complex IT infrastructure, such as financial instrument, telecommunications, and so on, in order to ensure the service quality, maintain and advance the image of enterprise, avoid business risks, enterprises with foresights will think from the strategic height and meet the demand of "high capability" in business development. In addition to such large banks as HSBC, some joint-stock commercial banks in small and medium-sized cities have also started to pay attention to the standard of system's "high capability".

Although the domestic enterprises increasingly pay great attention to the IT system's demand of "high capability", there still exist some errors and deviations between understanding and practicing. For example, regarding the high capability of IT system as an isolated incident of product quality, relying on upgrading the quality of software and hardware products to improve the capability of the system; lacking a clear goal of capability, even if there is, it is achieved by superimposing the capability indicators of software and hardware system, rather than setting from the prospective of business.

Actually, the maintenance of system high-capability is embodied in many important steps of IT; the effective way to pursuit high capability lies in optimizing or reconstructing the system structure. Only correcting the day-to-day single-point failure cannot fundamentally reduce its re-emergence possibility --- by reducing manual operation, increasing automatic operation to improve the capability of the entire IT infrastructure and ensure the flexibility and recovery capability of business and service, IT department can effectively prove its own value during the process of upgrading capability.

In other words, "high capability" is not a pure technical work in the day-to-day business. An authoritative survey shows that among the causes for system shutdown, the failures of software and hardware only take up 20%, but the other inappropriate operations including human errors, system infrastructures and applications occupy 80%; meanwhile, in the consideration of capability, the most effective way to improve "fault Time" and "system recovery time" is to upgrade the speed of human reaction according to the standard management process.

This means that during the communication between CIO and CFO or CEO about the capability of business platform, the improvement about adjusting organization process is necessary. We can see the exact effects only by striving for the support to improve management, including the computer service instruction, behavior record, clear responsibility, and a series of contents for staff, which cover many aspects such as IT system risk management. Apparently, there is no necessary relation between the upgrade of capability and huge investments on IT infrastructure, but the upgrade of capability has higher demand to be executed.

In addition, changing the operating mode of some enterprises also helps to upgrade the capability of platform --- analyzing from the prospective of enterprise's value, outsourcing becomes a trend when dealing with non-core values. For example, those IT outsourcing modes, such as data center trusteeship, customization and tenancy of enterprise's software, have been certificated by part of the enterprises which pay attention on the benefit-cost ratio. All these are helpful to solve part of the IT risk problem technically, and upgrade the capability to some extent.

Usually, solving the found problems of system security according to Standard Consultation Process at first (proposed), which is based on the idea of reducing IT risks and changing IT infrastructure and process management can achieve the goal of upgrading capability.