Availability Engineering

It's not only associated with IT assets but with other departments also. Availability is primarily used by the IT staffs to relate with the availability of the IT services in the organization. However other departments can also take a cue from the same and a process can be implemented to ensure that productivity and efficiency are not lost because of non availability of the resources. By intertwining Human asset engineering and Workability quotient Matrix an organization can achieve avalability index for each and every department. So apart from network gears, applications, databases and equipments other forces that actually runs the organization can also be made available despite of forced closures (bandhs), floods, earthquakes etc etc.

The premise to this remains very very simple:

For example I am hit by a flood.  I am small business. All I have is 50 staffs and all my staffs are located in one geography and every one is stranded. The flood has taken my data center down. I visualized this and have created a stand by center (hot, warm, cold) 100 miles away from my geography, so now I can switch open all my work by activating this mirror, but wait, who is going to perform the duties as all are stranded?

This basic never get answered by any one. The reason remains that one can replenish the hardwares and softwares but not human capital or rightly said human asset. 

At our company, which is a small consulting outfit and does niche work in the area of feasibility, assessment, value engineering and strategic management we have devised a simple solution. Despite what may happen even if one human resource is standing the work will go on. And how we have achieved that:

By re-engineering our work process. We have distributed the work space in various parts of the city with every batch of work (each activity is defined as a batch of work) that is happening gets updated instantaneously on web, on email, on phone, on paper and on files located at every ones house. So we afford to the have the luxury of loosing instant data at the time of happening.  And technology plays very small part in it. We never enter office together, we ensure that one person knows exactly what the other is doing and vice versa, we ensure that every one works on a collaborative framework, where each piece of knowledge gets shared among each other except the financial data. 

This definitely throws some challenges essentially in terms of data sharing that may happen with the outsiders, but why is law there for? We ensure that the contracts are stringent and we spell out the penalties so well that rarely one may think of sharing an important piece outside. Is this is dictatorship? No this is human asset engineering blended with workability matrix. Interesting isn't? More on this later....