"We Are Really Good at Incident Management." "I Am Sorry to Hear That."

It sounds rude. It is actually the most useful sentence in the book.

Incident management is the only purely reactive process in service management. It is triggered only when something has already failed, and its sole benefit is restoring a service that should not have broken in the first place. Being outstanding at it usually means you get a great deal of practice. That is not a badge of honour. It is a symptom.

Why do so many enterprises stay stuck in reactive mode? The book identifies four barriers.

The first is that everyone is too busy firefighting to prevent fires. The second is unreasonable deadlines, imposed by managers and customers, that push teams to cut corners. The third is that the cost of prevention is visible on a budget line while the cost of failure is spread invisibly across the enterprise. The fourth is the hero culture. We celebrate the people who fix things, and we barely notice the people who quietly stop things breaking.

Consider the Millennium Bug. On 1 January 2000, after a decade of unglamorous programming effort, almost nothing happened. The popular reaction was not gratitude. It was that the doom-mongers in IT had scared everyone to death over nothing. Prevention is thankless precisely when it works best.

The financial case for changing this is startling. The book cites research putting the cost of putting things right that should not have gone wrong at up to 30 per cent of an enterprise's turnover. Most enterprises run on profit margins of 5 to 10 per cent. There is a bigger prize hiding in prevention than in most growth strategies.

The practical first step is problem management, the process that finds and removes the causes of incidents rather than their symptoms. Industry figures cited in the book put outage costs at between 2,300 and more than 9,000 dollars per minute. One dedicated, trained problem manager who prevents a single serious outage a year pays for themselves several times over. The key word is dedicated. Assign someone to problem management part time and they will be sucked back into fighting today's incident, every time.

Good service providers fix failures fast. Excellent ones make failure rare. If your proudest capability is recovery, it may be time to ask what that says about prevention.