Here’s the problem my organization has been recently facing; we’ve been needing to take down our electronic medical record system (EMR) for a few minutes to fix a Problem, but the established downtime window is over a week away.  So during this time while waiting to implement the fix we’ve been needing to spend several hours in labor on the work-around.  Since this is a hospital the users pretty much live and die by the EMR, so taking it down, even for a few minutes, is a big deal with getting permission from the key business leaders, sending communications and the general coordination of the activities.  The other caveat is that we would also prefer to use the maintenance windows for the CI’s that are allowed to be changed and nothing else (a brief background – we have two EMR downtime windows a month, one for the general I.T. infrastructure and the other for application changes).  So how do we stay flexible with putting in Changes while not racking up the costs of just working around our Problems?  My idea:  Work with business leadership to allow a preplanned fifteen minute downtime each week for fixes.  This doesn’t mean we just take the system down every week, but if we do require the extra time our users will know by a specific date and they’ll know exactly when it will happen as well as being aware that it’s something serious enough that leadership would allow the downtime.  Obviously there would have to be governance around the plan to make sure it’s not abused, but this would also mean that we can eliminate a lot of the headache of an unplanned down-time by not having to track down business leadership for approvals, using an approved communication plan and giving the I.T. department more flexibility with being able to put in fixes to resolve Problems.

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Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.