It you have been to Ottawa in Winter or watched a video about iconic Canadian locations, you have probable seen people skating on the frozen Rideau Canal. It’s 8 kms of maintained ice surface that people use for fun, exercise and even commuting to and from work! The machines regularly used to maintain ice in hockey rinks are insufficient for the task, so a couple of Canadians designed a custom machine and filed the appropriate patent paperwork with the government office to protect their invention. The patent process required that they renew the patent and pay filing fees every year.

For nine years, the patent agent would send an email to the patent holder reminding him of the renewal requirement. More paperwork was filed, fees paid and things continued. In 2019, the email from the patent agent didn’t make it to the patent holder’s inbox, instead it was redirected to the email SPAM folder — as were the subsequent follow up emails. In 2020, the patent expired — following the patent office process.

The Rideau Canal Skateway is still being maintained, but without the patent to protect the equipment, the current contract holder will face stiffer competition when the contract next comes up for renewal. A few missed emails and a company is now facing a business crises.

Organizations are pretty good at maintaining processes that happen frequently and consistently. People remember how it worked yesterday, and will notice if something different occurs tomorrow. The greater the interval between occurrences the harder it is to document and maintain. We often treat these as exceptions. People are terrible at managing exceptions.

Companies purchase digital certificates with long expiry dates to minimize the cost of maintenance, then forget when they need to be renewed. Expired digital certificates can result in broken eCommerce, remote access, data security, etc. Similarly, domain names are registered for long periods. If forgotten about and allowed to expire, opportunistic threat actors can take over the registration and impersonate company servers. Most of IT runs on processes, and most of those processes are effective. Exception processes are notoriously fragile and problematic.

But these aren’t just IT challenges. Your entire organization relies on processes — though most of your people don’t think of them in that way. The less formal your process management is, the more likely it is that exception processes will fail. And some of those exceptions will have significant impacts. We are tempted to focus on regular processes where optimization has immediate benefits, but taking a cue from the risk management function, you should focus on the most valuable processes.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/froster-rideau-canal-skating-rink