Executive Client AdvisorBusiness Case 1

Meet Donna

Donna runs a successful Executive Client Advisor business.

Having been in the “advice” business for many years, her electronic rolodex had a client list of

many Fortune 1000 executives.

And of those, several were Fortune 100 executives.

Donna installed and learned various systems for her business, from ERP and CRM to web

publishing. Initially, Donna tackled maintaining her own IT equipment, from servers to laptops.

As her success grew, her “spare” time for maintaining her own equipment dwindled, even with retaining the services of a local IT support

service.

Witness the advent of cloud compute services. As the popularity and variety of cloud services

blossomed, Donna kept an eye on the cloud space...

Donna decided to initiate the transition of her own business’s IT foundation from local, physical systems,

to cloud services. She quickly ported her critical IT business functions into the cloud, feeling

optimistically about the move..

No more headaches with dead hard drives or rebooting servers.

No more worry about antivirus updates or applying the latest OS patches.

Her cloud vendors removed all of those concerns.

Except…

Donna landed a new customer with high stature and national visibility - one of the generals of the military contacted her to schedule advisement

sessions.

Success with this customer would lead to many referrals. So she established the session content and scheduled appointments of several hours in duration

over the course of a month.

As the day approached for her first session with this customer, the general called with two requests...

1) an adjustment to the number of sessions

2) the various topics and concerns they had established during the initial contact call?

She assured him the number of sessions would be adjusted, and she most definitely could e-mail to

him a copy of the schedule with the upcoming session topics.

It was Thursday COB, when the general had called.

Donna noted the changes, and set herself a reminder.

Friday morning…

She learned a significant outage had taken place at her cloud provider.

She called the cloud provider’s helpdesk, to find out what the state of things were, and did they have an

ETA for service recovery?

The news: multiple server farms were down in multiple data centers around the globe. They could not offer any solid ETA’s on restoration of the cloud

service.

They did have a twitter feed she could follow, though.

The outage lasted throughout the weekend, and into the next Monday. Some data loss was to be

expected.

The good news, however, was that service was slowly being restored, and everything would be fully

online no later than Tuesday morning.

Unfortunately, her first advisory session with the general was scheduled for Monday afternoon.

Although Donna was able to recover from the cloud service provider’s outage in due time, her business ground to a standstill while the cloud service was

down.

She found the experience to be frightening and stressful – the health of her “independent” business

had been entirely in the hands of unknown individuals in a large cloud provider…

… who, at the time of the outage, was so busy attempting to fix their service problem, was not

able to offer any personalized help to Donna.

– after all, she was just one of many thousands of customers of the cloud provider.