People, Purpose and the Standard That Brings It Together (By Mark Gradwell)
When colleagues ask me why someone in my position – VP Global Services at SUSE – invests time in an industry standards body, the answer is straightforward: because the problem we are solving is real, it is costly, and the industry has enough collective experience to actually fix it. IT outages are not inevitable. That is the founding conviction of the Zero Outage Industry Standard, and it is one I have believed in long enough to help build the workstream dedicated to the human side of making it true.
I have been involved in the People workstream since 2022, and I am now taking on the role of workstream lead. It feels like the right moment to introduce myself properly to those who may not know me, and to share what I think makes the 2026 release of the ZOIS Standard something worth paying close attention to.
Why the People workstream matters
There is a tendency in IT reliability discussions to gravitate towards technology – architecture, automation and tooling. Those things matter enormously and the ZOIS Standard covers them in depth. But in my experience running global services at scale, the vast majority of outages trace back, directly or indirectly, to people: a decision made without enough context, a skill that wasn’t there when it was needed, a team structure that created a blind spot, a culture that punished the messenger instead of fixing the system.
That is why the People workstream exists, and why I believe it is foundational to everything else in the standard.
The 2026 release reflects years of collective thinking on this. Rather than prescribing job titles, which differ widely across organisations, the People chapter focuses on the competencies and behaviours that a Zero Outage environment actually requires. From the Business Value Stream Architect who embeds resilience requirements before a line of code is written, to the Major Incident Commander who orchestrates recovery with clarity and calm, to the Problem and Root Cause Elimination Lead who ensures we are fixing systems rather than symptoms: the standard describes what good looks like at every stage of the IT value chain.
Two themes stand out to me in the 2026 People chapter that I want to highlight specifically:
Cross-functional collaboration is not a soft skill – it is a Zero Outage requirement.
Siloed teams are an outage risk. The standard is explicit that achieving Zero Outage quality requires people across Plan, Build, Deliver, and Run to work as a genuinely integrated end-to-end system, not as handoff points in a chain. This has structural implications for how organisations build their teams, not just cultural ones.
AI literacy is now a core competency, not an optional extra.
The 2026 standard integrates AI augmentation throughout the People chapter, not as a future consideration, but as a present-tense expectation. The ability to work with AI-driven analytics, to interpret automated tooling, and to build systems that leverage intelligent automation is part of what a Zero Outage-capable workforce looks like today. We have been deliberate about this, because the standard should reflect where the industry actually is.
What the 2026 Standard delivers across the board
Far from operating in isolation, the People workstream is a foundational element of the 2026 standard, which now offers enhanced alignment across the Architecture, Processes, Platforms, and Security domains.
The competency framework we have built is designed to be adapted
If you work in IT service delivery – as a provider, a consumer, or both – the ZOIS 2026 Standard has something for you. It is available as a reference for architectural decisions, as a framework for building capability programmes and as a benchmark for assessing where your organisation stands against industry best practice.
From the People workstream’s perspective, I particularly encourage HR leaders, service management professionals, and anyone responsible for workforce capability in a technology organisation to engage with the People chapter. The competency framework we have built is designed to be adapted, not just read.
I am proud of what this community has built, and I look forward to the conversations and challenges that the 2026 release will generate.
Mark Gradwell is Vice President Global Services at SUSE, a Member of the Board of Directors of the Zero Outage Industry Standard and leads the ZOIS People Workstream.
