Is Quality of Service as important as Qualities of Service?

I had the opportunity this week to talk to Laura Didio after reading her article at E-Commerce Times: Oracle’s Downward Spiral.   I’ll save specific comment on the results of a recent ITIC survey re: Database Reliability and Deployment Trends until after the report is published.  However, the article and our discussion reminded me of an important add to the “workload optimized” concepts I wrote about in earlier posts.

In addition to most cost efficiently optimizing a system to meet a solution’s required Qualities of Service (Performance, reliability, security..),  organizations also need to cost efficiently optimize the Quality of Service required of their technology partner(s).    As I wrote earlier,  when considering the old axiom “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” you need to think about the total cost you are spending as well as the function and qualities of services.    While the latter 2 may be fine, if you are paying a lot more to deliver that service than you could be paying using alternatives… then it is “broken.”

Quality of Service is a factor in Cost Efficiency

As the ITIC survey indicates, clients are increasingly aware of the imbalance between the price they are paying and the value they are receiving – especially as they are experiencing declining value of service and support.     Those in the IT game can easily imagine the high costs added to operations when expensive human intervention and poor performing workarounds are required to keep business solutions running until proper support, fixes and updates are delivered by a technology provider.

So obviously I believe the answer my question is:  “Yes, Quality of service is as important.”

Anyone think otherwise and up for a debate?