The finance director

The finance director is increasingly assuming responsibility for the general health of the business - including its most important applications and systems. Yet of all these applications, nothing is more mission-critical than email and Microsoft Exchange - whose use has infiltrated the business seemingly uncontrollably.

Neil Robertson of high availability specialists the Neverfail Group, argues that finance directors need to pay more attention to the link between failed mail systems and bottom-line financial performance, in order to protect the business, and add value for the medium and long terms.

The finance director has never had it so good. In the last 15 years his star has risen from secluded bean-counter to Renaissance man, from purveyor of abstract numbers to champion of integrated IT that encompasses the company's most important applications and systems.

This rise in stature, however, has come at a price. The very leadership that put the FD ahead of the in-house IT curve has also left him in the firing line when things go wrong. Not just when files are inaccessible for two hours, but more importantly when mission-critical systems decide arbitrarily to take a sickie.

In today's organisations, nothing is more mission-critical than e-mail, and by default that means, in the majority of cases, Microsoft Exchange. And for the FD, on to whose lap it's fallen, this represents a major problem, since the prevalence of Exchange has had nothing to do with in-house policies. It has seemingly spread uncontrollably and without any apparent means of support.

What's more, e-mail has in many cases replaced the phone as the primary communications channel for all an organisation's key constituencies - customers, partners, prospects and employees, in particular through the corporate Web site, intranet or extranet. This means that when the mail system goes down, every employee knows about it in a hurry, if only by the lack of response to their urgent email requests, the inability to book appointments or track down colleagues as their online diaries or schedules are suddenly unavailable. And given the nature of today's connected world, it might be fair to assume that customers, partners and prospects are made equally aware in just as short a time - but are they? And even if they are aware, what's to say that they will accept IT failure as a valid reason for poor service?

All of this highlights the inherent risk to business success that Exchange represents, which makes it all the more astonishing that there too often remains no real ownership of it. IT managers may be responsible for fixing it, but it's left to finance directors to ensure that e-mail failure is minimised - something that can be difficult to manage when there is no clear policy or support.

For most companies, a shift in thinking is required that will elevate Exchange to mission-critical status, putting it on the same level as their core database, ERP and transaction-based systems. And that means applying the same risk analysis and service-level criteria, taking on board the convenience and ultimately cost implications associated with frustrated customers, trading partners and handcuffed helpdesk and sales staff.

Most organisations have no means of finding out the cost of Exchange being off-line, as it would require input from every user, every customer and every supplier to determine the consequences. However, it is not difficult to consider the likely cost if 80% of all communications cease for 24 to 48 hours across every activity of the business.

Besides the immediate effect of frustrated users, less obvious but potentially hugely expensive repercussions are now increasingly being revealed. Tender documents for major contracts, for instance, have been known to go missing among thousands of lost e-mails through unexpected Exchange failures.

Likewise, long-term alliances with major supply-chain partners can suffer seriously because e-mail downtime has revealed the company's inability to maintain an acceptable quality of service, an issue that ranks increasingly highly in the UK and Europe following the lead set in North America. The key issue here is tolerance, or what partners and customers are willing to put up with. Blaming poor service on failed e-mail systems has to a large extent been an accepted practice, because it caught the mood of the times: "IT doesn't work"; so everyone should accept its shortcomings.

Today, in 2003, that simply isn't good enough. In the UK, tolerance levels for poor service have been shrinking rapidly over the past decade, and that cultural change is expanding to cover every area of modern life. Poor service, for whatever reason, is now intolerable for a fast-growing proportion of the population.

For the finance director, now the overseer of the company's general health, that means sales and profits are seriously at risk if Exchange Server becomes unavailable, not to mention longer term ramifications. The implications of lost productivity, lost sales, poor service and lost customers are all unacceptable risks at any time, but more so in a tough trading environment.

In that light, it's no exaggeration to suggest that the entire corporate edifice is at risk of collapsing should Exchange become unavailable for more than a very short time.

The direct link between failed mail systems and bottom-line financial performance is, once it's flagged, obvious. But it takes that prodding to begin with, which in turn comes from a change in outlook at management level that both recognises the importance to their companies of Exchange, and acknowledges the need for change.

While the obvious next step is to ensure uptime can be guaranteed at very high levels, the precise means of doing so has not been so readily spotted, since the high-availability emphasis has traditionally been on the underlying infrastructure. Yet, server availability levels are now extremely high, and upgrading them to five-nines (99.999%) capability, possibly through simple failover facilities, now carries a relatively small overhead. Equally, the underlying operating system has improved by leaps and bounds since Windows 2000 came on stream, while network equipment is virtually guaranteed to work forever.

Which effectively leaves the application as the main area of focus, allied to a thorough understanding of the consequences of downtime.

The public expression of due diligence is becoming more than a fashionable sop to financial regulators; it says to the world that your company operates professionally and is in it for the long haul. By insisting that the availability of corporate Exchange Server is guaranteed, finance directors are simultaneously protecting their business while building underlying added value for the mid and long terms. Particularly if this could be achieved for a mere four figure sum, the message and the answer could not be simpler.