IT teams can report 99% uptime while executives watch revenue disappear during the 1% nobody planned for. Ronald Dews Jr. has spent more than 20 years leading IT operations across Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 organizations, and he learned an uncomfortable truth early: uptime percentages do not matter when a single incident halts transactions and erodes customer trust.
Technical metrics can look great in quarterly reviews. Then a system fails at the worst possible moment, and the business discovers it was measuring performance instead of resilience. Too many IT leaders stay focused on response times, optimizing how well teams manage failure, rather than building the stability that prevents catastrophic failures in the first place.
After years of turning disciplined IT service management into reliability that protects revenue, Dews has a clear point of view. Measurable value comes from treating stability as a business requirement, not a technical target, and using ITSM with automation to drive repeatable outcomes, not simply manage tickets.
Stability Protects Revenue, Not Just Systems
When systems fail, revenue stops. Productivity halts. Customers lose confidence, and rebuilding that trust is far harder than restoring service. Dews led efforts to stabilize more than 100,000 cloud systems to 99% reliability, driving over $2.5 million in risk mitigation and cost avoidance. High blast radius incidents dropped by 95%. Many IT teams track incident response time as a primary signal of performance. Those metrics reward speed after something breaks, not the work that keeps it from breaking. High blast radius incidents are especially damaging because they take down services that thousands of people rely on at once, spreading disruption across an entire organization.
“The key is tight ITSM controls, proactive monitoring, and governing changes like it’s a high-stakes game, because it is,” Dews explains.
In practice, tight controls mean documented impact analysis, stakeholder approval, and rollback plans before changes go live. Proactive monitoring means detecting anomalies before users feel them. And governing changes like a high-stakes game means treating every deployment as a potential business disruption, because that is exactly what it becomes when something goes wrong. A 95% reduction in high blast radius incidents creates value by preventing losses, not by improving a dashboard. Maintaining 99% reliability across 100,000 cloud systems while mitigating $2.5 million in risk shows what stability really is: a business outcome.
ITSM and Automation Create Repeatable Outcomes
“Using platforms like ServiceNow, I helped a Fortune 500 enterprise deliver 12+ zero-outage release cycles and reduced reporting efforts by 40 hours a month,” Dews says.
Most organizations implement ITSM to manage tickets, and that choice frames it as administrative overhead. The difference shows up in outcomes. Twelve consecutive zero-outage release cycles are not luck. They are discipline. Traditional release management often assumes deployments will cause incidents. Zero-outage releases require rigorous testing, phased rollouts, automated validation, and rollback that can be executed immediately. Automation also changes what senior engineers spend their time doing. Cutting 40 hours a month of reporting work frees teams from manual data gathering and repetitive documentation, and gives them time to focus on risk reduction. When knowledge systems scale, visibility becomes real-time through automated dashboards, processes become standardized, and repeatable solutions reduce resolution time when incidents do occur.
That operational maturity shows up most clearly during high-pressure events. When the global CrowdStrike outage hit, Dews’s team safeguarded more than $10 million by moving quickly, communicating clearly, and executing business continuity protocols they had practiced in advance. “Whether it’s an outage, a release, or an audit, leadership means showing up prepared, aligned, and always focused on protecting value,” Dews notes.
Do What Matters With Discipline
“It’s not about doing more. It’s about doing what matters with discipline. When that happens, IT becomes not just a call center, but a driver of financial and organizational strength,” Dews concludes. Stability becomes measurable when it is treated as a business requirement, supported by tight controls and proactive monitoring. Mature ITSM, paired with automation, creates repeatable outcomes that protect revenue and customer trust. That distinction determines whether IT operates as a cost center or a strategic capability, and whether reliability becomes a competitive advantage that others cannot easily match.
Connect with Ronald Dews Jr. on LinkedIn for insights on delivering measurable IT value.
