Depending on Data
The power of the computer now means that we have literally limitless data and information at our fingertips. Most of us nowadays are used to “googling” something on our smartphones (forget desktops) to find out about it. Our business servers can store huge amounts of information to be accessed whenever (and wherever) we want. There are companies whose reason for existing is to support others in their acquisition, manipulation and presentation of information.
I recently saw an interesting question: what happens when we can’t access our data?
So much is “online” these days, or on company servers, but things can (and do) happen that may prevent access. I remember one experience as I started my career in banking in the mid-80s where our mainframe was so overloaded that we couldn’t access customer balances due to the fact that the “offline run” was taking place during the working day. We literally had to work with printouts of closing balances as at the end of the previous day and manually update them.
Some of us will have been caught at airport check-in counters when the systems were “down”.
The end of the old millennium and the start of the new one saw a huge rise in the number of specialists offering services to ensure that businesses were “Y2K-compliant”. At the time, I was based in Moscow and, when I asked my banking colleagues in other banks if they had any concerns, their reply was that they were probably compliant as they had computerised relatively late compared to western banks, and that anyway, there were enough staff who remembered the manual procedures!
At a basic level, our office premises may not be accessible for some reason or (as in the case above) the computers may not be working. When we lose our access to our data, we need to answer a number of questions:
- How long can we afford to have systems “down” before things start to escalate?
- Does business have to stop (with the attendant inconvenience to customers and potential loss of business)?
- Or can we carry on, somehow (albeit, with a higher risk that something may not be recorded properly)?
- Can our business accept a degree of loss through “manual errors” in order to keep things going and customers happy?
- Which systems (if any) are more “important” to get up and running first?
- Can we duplicate systems so that we can cut over to another if things go wrong?
- Is any confidential information likely to be compromised?
We all need to ask how dependent our business (and people) really are on data and, having identified this, decide what we can do to mitigate any “access issues”.
Labels: Crisis Management, Customer Care, Leadership, Productivity, Risk, Strategy
posted by William Martin @ 10:06
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