How long until people leave and shop elsewhere? Imagine people lining up overnight outside your five to ten largest physical stores the day after Thanksgiving.
Once you've let them into the store, turn off the point of sale systems so no one can buy the things they've piled into their carts.
Perhaps not enough shopping carts are available for shoppers, or the fire marshal has limited the number of people allowed in the store at one time, so bouncers need to be in place to let a shopper in only when another shopper leaves.
Online, your shoppers can use a search engine to find whatever you're selling elsewhere, and like ants, they may continue to go elsewhere because your site is associated with "slow.
" Most organizations give little thought to capacity planning and peak preparedness.
Few people can say what the maximum aggregate throughput is of the entire system.
Few people can reliably point to a single component as the bottleneck of the system, or the component most likely to fail under load.
The absence of knowledge and awareness results in a large number of retailers experiencing outages at the worst possible time-when making the most sales of the year and generating the most revenue.
Corporate funding cycles make it important that IT executives are empowered with the knowledge necessary to "sell" peak preparedness projects to the COO, CFO, or other business partners.
These projects can be expensive and a compelling argument will be necessary to secure funding.
The difficulty is the same as with most internal IT projects.
Because IT is a cost center in almost every organization, it's important to communicate that capacity planning and peak preparedness focus on managing risk and protecting sales.
While business partners may be reluctant to spend one million dollars on holiday readiness, they will definitely blame IT for five million dollars in lost sales due to site slowness.
Regardless of the expression, much anxiety in IT departments is based on uncertainty.
If you work in online retail (e-commerce), you will have seen staffers repeatedly hit "reload" in their web browsers with a nervous frequency, hoping not to see a blank page, an application error, or a slow page.
While this anxiety can never be fully eliminated as reputations, jobs, compensation, and bonuses depend on a continued and consistent flow of sales transactions, it can be focused on known limitations.
Those limitations can be identified and measured before the peak days.
They can be monitored automatically, notifying the operations staff when intervention will soon be needed.
Not everything can be anticipated, but after hundreds of years of retail, and twenty years of online retail(e-commerce), we have available to us a body of knowledge and a set of patterns to follow to prepare for peak sales demand.
Most IT professionals clearly understand that they "support the business.
" "The business contains a number of professionals who are marketers, merchants, merchandizers, customer service representatives, planners, product managers, content producers, editors, and analysts.