“A stitch in time saves nine,” goes the old saying, and nowhere is this more true than in IT service management. Small problems left unattended quickly snowball into major disasters that cost companies millions and destroy customer trust.
Just like Delta Air Lines. In 2016, a power outage at its Atlanta data center should have been a minor hiccup. Instead, it turned into a three-day nightmare that cancelled 2,300 flights and cost the company $150 million. Why? Because it didn’t have proper backup systems and recovery procedures in place.
What went wrong at Delta could happen anywhere
Hackers or natural disasters didn’t cause Delta’s meltdown. It was caused by poor IT service management. When the company’s primary systems failed, its backup systems couldn’t handle the load. The staff didn’t know how to check in passengers manually. Delta’s communication systems broke down. Thousands of travelers were stranded, and Delta’s reputation took a beating that lasted months.
The cascade effect of poor planning
This is what happens when you don’t have structured processes for managing IT services. One small failure triggers another, then another, until the entire operation collapses. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) exists precisely to prevent these kinds of disasters by building redundancy and clear response procedures into every system.
How Netflix does it right
Compare Delta’s approach to Netflix. When Netflix experiences an outage, most users don’t even notice. That’s because the streaming platform has built its entire IT infrastructure around ITIL principles. Netflix calls it “chaos engineering”—it deliberately breaks things to see what happens, then fixes the weaknesses before real problems occur.
Proactive testing prevents real disasters
Netflix runs hundreds of small experiments every day. It shuts down servers randomly and simulates network failures. Netflix tests what happens when entire data centers go offline. Because it does this constantly, its systems are designed to handle failures gracefully.
When a real problem hits, Netflix’s IT service management processes kick in automatically. Traffic gets rerouted. Backup systems take over. Users keep watching their shows without interruption.
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The Toyota approach to IT problems
Toyota revolutionized manufacturing with its “lean” philosophy, but it has applied the same thinking to IT operations. When something goes wrong in IT systems, the company doesn’t just fix it and move on. It asks “why” five times to get to the root cause.
Digging deeper than surface fixes
For example, when Toyota’s email system went down last year, it didn’t just restart the servers. It asked: Why did the servers crash? Because they ran out of memory. Why did they run out of memory? Because a software update changed how much memory the system used.
Why wasn’t this caught in testing? Because the test environment didn’t match production. Why didn’t the environments match? Because the company hadn’t updated its testing procedures in two years.
By the time Toyota finished asking “why,” it had identified and fixed five different problems, not just one.
Small fixes prevent big disasters
ITIL works because it forces companies to think ahead. Instead of waiting for disasters to strike, smart companies use IT service management to spot problems early and fix them before they grow.
Southwest Airlines learned this lesson after watching other airlines struggle with IT failures. It invested heavily in ITIL-based processes and now has some of the most reliable systems in the industry. When weather or other airlines cause travel disruptions, Southwest bounces back faster because its IT service management processes help it coordinate operations efficiently.
The lesson? Don’t wait for your Delta moment. Invest in proper IT service management now, while you still have time to get it right.
