• Stability versus responsiveness: Changes are frequently the causes of
incidents and loss of availability, so it may be tempting to limit the number of changes in order to boost the stability of services. However, changes will always be needed in order to keep service up to date and to adopt to evolving business needs. The balance is between being able to speedily respond to changes and focusing on the stability of the infrastructure.
• Quality of service versus cost of service: There will always be pressures to boost the quality of IT services while controlling costs. Intense budgetary pressures may lead to reduced levels of service with more failures and less support. On the other hand, organisations out of balance on the ‘other side’ may be paying too much for their services with resilience built in that cannot be justified. The key is to have a meaningful dialogue over costs ensuring that the business fully understands what it gets and does not get for a certain amount of money and what it would get if it spent a bit less or a bit more.
• Reactive versus proactive: An extremely proactive organisation will always be predicting where things could go wrong and taking action to mitigate or prevent the situation. Taken to the extreme, such organisations may over monitor and apply unnecessary changes. Conversely, organisations that are purely reactive spend most of their time ‘fire fighting’ and dealing with situations as they arise, and they need to move more to the ‘fire prevention’ approach of
predicting and avoiding incidents and problems.