Why Click Frenzy Click Failed

It’s history now, what was touted as the greatest online shopping bonanza Australia has ever seen has become the latest spectacular technical failure. Why?

It’s easy for us in the IT world to breath a collective “I told you so” it was not unexpected, however I do personally have experience in this type of technical failure, having been brought in to determine why in 2001 on the night of the launch of Big Brother the voting website melted down in similar fashion.

Since the meltdown we have be bombarded with “spin” as to what went wrong, but just like in 2001 the bottom line will simply be “poor planning” which as we all know leads to poor execution.

At this stage exactly what “technically failed” is anyone’s guess, but again I can’t emphasise enough that poor planning will be the underlying root cause.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and countless other online companies manage millions of hits per hour and they don’t fall over. Why, because technology isn’t 100% reliable, we all know this things break. However the difference is they plan for this and have systems and procedures in place to ensure they don’t fall victim to a technical issue.

I don’t care if you’re a ten seat network or Google, the result will be exactly the same if you rely on technology and don’t plan for its failure then I’m sorry but you are going to look foolish in the eyes of your clients when something inevitably goes wrong.

We all have clients and we all strive to provide the best for them, however when you fail to deliver they have very long memories.

Will click frenzy rise from the ashes of this debacle? I don’t know, what I do know however is there’s a lesson to be learnt for every single one of us in business today.

When it comes to technology you can be certain it will have failures large and small at some stage, and whilst in our personal business worlds it may not affect the masses or be as well publicised as click frenzy. We can all be certain that one way or another it will affect our productivity at the very least and therefore affect our clients who are relying on us to deliver.

So the lesson to be learnt is don’t take technology for granted, it will fail you at some stage, the size and impact of that failure and the affect it has on your clients all comes down to your prior planning.