You go to an office, you want a report from them, you ask them for the report. You can’t get the report yet, you must wait. What could be the reasons?

Not-so-long-ago

1. The person who creates the report has gone for tea.
2. The file from which data needs to be copied is missing. Someone is trying to locate it.
3. The person who needs to sign the report missed his bus and is still on the way to office.

And many more like these. But what’s the single reason that I get today when my work can’t be done by the concerned officials?

1. The server is down.

That’s all. I couldn’t collect a medical report from Manipal hospital because their server was down and they couldn’t print the report. My Bangalore Airtel numbers are not getting provisioned because their server is down. Once I stood on Deccan Airways window for a ticket for 3 hours because their server was down.

The life is moving online very fast. However, we are not doing enough to make the online world reliable. The common practise is to just move all the operations and the data online and assume that it will always work.

But the reality is that it doesn’t always work! Wake up guys, build reliability and the speed into your system. Don’t assume they come for free. On the contrary, they cost a lot of money.