Tag Archives: IT

Watergate 2016: The Evolution of Technology

Stylized photo of a hooded hacker at a laptop.The political season in the U.S. is now in full swing and I had to smile at a recent article about a security breach of a Democratic National Committee server and the  alleged theft of background information on the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. For a moment I thought I had slipped back to 1972 when a break-in and attempted wiretap occurred at the Watergate hotel and office complex where the Democratic Committee was headquartered. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In this case though, the technology has evolved from breaking, entering, and wiretapping to sophisticated digital entry to specific servers. Let’s take a look at the evolution of technology in terms of security.

1972

I followed the Watergate scandal closely even though I was only a teenager. Members of the “committee to re-elect the president” were found to have masterminded a break in into the Watergate office building to plant wiretaps on the phones of key members of the Democratic Committee. Several players were indicted and sentenced to prison and President Nixon eventually resigned under suspicion of having authorized the break-in and for keeping secret recordings. When the Watergate burglars were caught, they were found with:

“… at least two sophisticated devices capable of picking up and transmitting all talk, including telephone conversations. In addition, police found lock-picks and door jimmies, almost $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence.

The men also had with them one walkie-talkie, a short wave receiver that could pick up police calls, 40 rolls of unexposed film, two 35 millimeter cameras and three pen-sized tear gas guns.”

2016

Fast forward almost 45 years and consider the modern tools of the burglary/cyber espionage trade. No longer is it necessary to even be near a physical building; a lucrative break-in can be done from anywhere. As of this writing, it is believed that hackers linked to the Russian government broke into the Democratic National Committee servers, presumably while in Russia. Whether that can ever be substantiated or whether the individuals behind the break-in will ever be brought to justice is doubtful. Part of the hacking ethos is to cover digital tracks through multiple systems and connections so as to mask the hacker’s identity.

Thoughts

Catching five burglars with wiretapping equipment in an office building was a piece of cake compared to what law enforcement faces today. The stakes are higher in terms of the information stores that we keep and the break-in methods are much more sophisticated. The tools needed to track and prevent a strike are complicated and require advanced education and skills. As long as we continue to have security breaches, both in politics and business, organizations of all types will seek qualified professionals. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

Setting and Achieving Goals with Technology

Photograph of vintage map and compass.Technology has been used to establish and realize goals since mariners relied on maps, compasses and sextants to reach their destination. I have read several books and articles over the years that claim setting goals is a surefire path to success. Actually, setting and achieving goals are both required to realize dreams. If this is the case, then can I use technology to help me with my goals? Can technology accomplish my goals for me, or do I still need to do some of the heavy lifting? For this blog I researched applications that help in the process, but I have come to realize they are not magic.

Technology Assistance

If good health is the goal, then fitness trackers are a great way to monitor your progress. I spoke with a clerk last week at a large hardware store who claimed she walked 120,000 steps in the last week. In her case, her kids got her a FitBit for Mother’s Day so they could marvel at the energy she expended while on the job. For her, it is more for information and entertainment than for achieving a specific goal, but I have met others who set daily and weekly goals and are religious about achieving those steps walked or calories burned. In that case, the technology behind the fitness tracker provides very real motivation to achieve goals.

Tracking Goals

The Android app GoalTracker allows you to list your goals with particular target values and time deadlines and then helps in breaking down those goals into manageable pieces. This app will alert you when you are or are not meeting your goals. It provides for a nice visual interface to let you know how close you are to achieving your goal or whether you are on track based on your desired timeframe and values. This is a great way to easily track your progress.

Habit Forming

Another Android app that is helpful is the Habit Bull. This application helps you to cultivate healthy habits or break bad habits through monitoring, suggestions, and reminders. The app provides an intuitive interface for establishing achievable goals in areas such as fitness, finance, relationships, or relaxation. It seems odd that we would need reminders to participate in a relaxing hobby or diversion, but such is our modern world.

Thoughts

For ancient mariners the first step toward achieving their goal was to launch their boat in the water and point it in what they thought was the right direction. The compass and map was their guide, but they had to take the first step. In the same vein, I haven’t yet found an app or technology that will achieve my goals for me but they can help me chart my course, track my progress and stay motivated to complete my journey.

Have you found technology that helps you to complete your goals, whether personal or at work? I invite you to share your experiences of what works and what does not work for you.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

Why You Need to be a 5 Tool Player to be Successful

MultitaskingThe following guest blog is provided by alumni Thomas Failor, who is speaking from the perspective of an IT practitioner. AIM graduates practice in a wide variety of disciplines, both technical and non-technical.

You might think that when you graduate with your AIM degree, you’ll be working in a purely IT role, either in engineering, IT development or service delivery, or otherwise focused on a single thread type of task. You also might think that you’ll only work in a technical role or never have to talk to pesky customers again. But that’s not always the case.

With the professional baseball season just underway, I am reminded of an analogy between sports and business that I’ve found valuable. Most companies, even very large ones, expect a knowledge worker with an advanced degree to be what in baseball is referred to as a “5 Tool Player.” In the big leagues, a 5 Tool Player can hit for average, hit for power, run the bases, throw for distance, and field the ball. The broad technology field is no different. Here’s my take on the 5 Tools you need to thrive on the technical side of business.

To be a 5 Tool Player in IT or elsewhere, you must be able to listen with intent, advocate for your customer, consult, collaborate, and communicate, both internally and externally, to be effective.

Listen with Intent

This is pure Steven Covey and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Don’t listen with the intent only to reply. Stop trying to think up your next reply while your associate is still speaking. It’s a challenge, but it’s so much more effective to listen with the intent to understand than just to come up with an answer quickly. Try counting to five before you answer, and preface your response with a validation of the other party’s statement, like “You bring up a good point” or, “That’s a great question.”

Advocate for the Customer

Some people refer to this as the “Voice of the Customer” or VOC in Six Sigma. After you listen with intent, you need to express the VOC or advocate for your customer to get your project done, solution approved, capital expenditures funded, or what have you. Promoting understanding and empathy by advocating for the customer makes you much more effective, (especially in the eyes of the customer), but also demonstrates to the teams you collaborate with your understanding of requirements when it comes time to dig deep into a project. If you fail to listen, you really can’t advocate and you waste business cycles trying to get things like requirements approved and your project moving forward.

Consult

Flex your technical muscles, and provide advice and solutions sets. This is usually the part of our work that we love the most but get to do the least. The truth is that the other 5 Tools get you to your consultation role more effectively. Consulting isn’t all about what you know. Often it’s about providing a range of solutions as a set of choices to your customer. In general, I’ve found that customers hate to be “sold” but they love to “choose.” (Credit: Jeffrey Gitomer)

In offering multiple consultative choices, you increase the likelihood that your customer will choose one of them and thus move your project/process/program forward without delay.

Collaborate

Play nicely with others. One of the pitfalls encountered by some brilliant technical people is that they’ve spent much of their career “heads down” perfecting their craft. Surely that’s important, but if you aren’t able to work with diverse groups with widely ranging technical skills, you only make more work for yourself. Project managers and program managers who may not have a technical background likely depend on you to translate and communicate with your friends on the development/engineering team and drive issues to resolution. I do this type of work every day. If you are able to gather stakeholders, project managers, and solution providers in a room and act as a collaboration facilitator, your work gets done more quickly and you’ve made allies for next time.

Communicate

This is the Achilles heel of many technical practitioners. If we can’t convey our analyses in writing, pitch an idea to an audience without reading 20 slides of PowerPoint word-for-word, or expectations with a customer, you’ll likely be less effective. Don’t depend on your manager or the department extrovert to communicate for you. Speaking and writing effectively are learned skills. Being able to communicate an idea clearly gets your budget approved, a new headcount, more servers, etc.

I have to use the 5 Tools every day to be effective in my work as the liaison between IT and the many needs of the business. It’s all very good to be a highly technical player, and if you work specifically within software development, networking, or security you may be able to get by without work days like mine, but it’s not very likely. Businesses depend on technology leaders to deliver technology solutions, but they also depend on you to be a 5 Tool Player.

 

Thomas Failor photograph.Guest blogger Thomas Failor (’14) is a senior program manager with T-Mobile in the In-Store Technology and Front Line Systems group, part of the Sales Operations Center of Excellence.

Tech Matters in Emerging Economies

Emerging nations often have the advantage in infrastructure deployments and upgrades because they have no legacy infrastructure to replace: they can just start from scratch. Legacy infrastructure can stifle innovation because of real and perceived barriers. In researching this subject, I questioned how much technology can help emerging countries that may struggle to house and feed their citizens and/or refugees from nearby countries. I would like to spotlight the work of Nethope, which aims to expand tech to lift nations from poverty and provide opportunities for growth through innovation.

How Much Tech?

In 1989 my wife and I toured Egypt and we traveled through a small village with basic concrete houses. We watched as the residents made their way to fields in the morning to harvest the crops. In the evening they returned to homes that had no electricity, modern lighting, or communications. They filtered water from the nearby Nile. This was their daily routine. I compared that with my role at the time as a computer administrator and realized the absurdity of my work in contrast to this simple everyday life. They had no use for the work that I did, which would not help move that cart to and from the field and would probably not increase their harvest or enhance their lives. My skills and knowledge were useless to them.

Should we concentrate on bringing technology to impoverished nations and villages? How would technology benefit people whose lives revolve around providing basic needs? Can it help in providing clean water, basic health care, communications and education? Which problems are we trying to solve through innovation? These are questions I no longer assume I know how to answer.

Nethope

Nethope is a non-profit organization dedicated to matching tech firms and individuals with non-governmental organizations to apply innovation to solve problems in emerging nations. Much of their focus is on wireless connectivity and building alternative energy sources to power the infrastructure. They have provided portable cellular hot spots for Syrian refugees to connect them with family members back home and with aid organizations. It also might enable young people to continue their studies, although sporadically, through online education programs.

A similar project established internet connectivity in a refugee camp in Kenya. Refugees flooded there to escape famine, drought, and conflict. This camp has become the fourth largest population center in Kenya and is a temporary home for thousands. As in the Syrian refugee crisis, it is hoped that the youth in particular will be able to continue their education through remote courses. In another area of Kenya, wi-fi hotspots were established with unused television whitespace. This might give villagers an opportunity to improve their lives through education and expanded business opportunities.

Coordination

One of the services provided by Nethope is technology coordination between many non-governmental aid organizations. Each organization tries to aid in various ways and sometimes they end up stepping over each other, particularly in areas such as technology infrastructure. Nethope and their partners provide expertise and coordination, whether it be a temporary crisis or an ongoing project. This approach allows the other aid organizations to focus on their strengths providing for basic necessities.

Thoughts

Has technology become a basic necessity or is it still a luxury? In an emergency, where does it fall on the list of priorities? I live near an earthquake fault and try to be prepared for a potential disaster. On the one hand, I can’t eat my smartphone, but on the other hand it would come in handy should my house suddenly become an island. I applaud the efforts of Nethope and other organizations that share their expertise with those in need. It is good to provide basic necessities and basic communications. I wish them well on their quest.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

The Consumerization of IT

Photo of businesspeople using devices.It used to be that information technology was the domain of specialists. In the last 10 years, the adoption of new technology has shifted to the consumer and not the enterprise. As a result, employees who were accustomed to using technology at home pushed for adoption in the workplace. This left IT groups scrambling to adapt their policies and applications to work with consumer devices and software, not always willingly.

This consumerization of technology inspired the popularity of bring your own device (BYOD) to work. The two main concerns over this trend are first and foremost security and second, compatibility with corporate applications. While it is desirable to access data and applications anytime, anywhere, and on any device, it is not always easy or safe. In this blog post I will look at the history and future trends of the IT consumerization. Will we continue as we have, or will the enterprise once again take the lead in new technology adoption?

History

Computers were originally used in government and businesses for things such as bomb trajectory calculations in World War II, tabulating voters’ ballots for presidential elections, and organizing corporate accounting activities. Operators and programmers were in charge of running the computers and any task or requests had to be fed through them. The query results came as printouts, not displayed on a desktop screen. Even as late as the mid-1980s I remember working in a large computer room where we printed stacks of paper that were set outside the computer room to be retrieved. Only computer operators and technicians were allowed inside the room. Access to the computers was through dumb terminals as input and the generated paper results as output.

Personal Computers

Apple and other companies sold computers to hobbyists in the late 1970s. While this was technically a consumer product, it was considered a niche market. When IBM introduced the personal computer in 1981, it was targeting the corporate employee, not individual consumers. When user-friendly word processing and spreadsheet software became available, consumers began buying computers for home use.

Networking

Without connecting the home computer to the outside world, people were still left with the same problem of input and output. Input came through the keyboard or from a disk, and the output came to a printer or screen or to another disk. The disks had limited capacity so to share a program or data, one had to have multiple disks that were hopefully labeled correctly. With early dial-up modems, people could finally share information (not graphics, that would take forever) with each other. As consumer networks improved, so did our desire to connect and share things with each other and the lines between work and home began to blur.

The Tipping Point

The tipping point for the consumerization of IT came with smartphones and tablets. Laptops were certainly more mobile and could go back and forth from home to work, but the smartphone and tablet made it even easier to live in both worlds. IT departments initially rejected tablets as not being robust and secure enough for the enterprise. The smartphone was even worse because it was so portable. Blackberry was one of the pioneers in bridging the gap between corporate e-mail and information systems and consumer devices. Salespeople and executives could receive information while they were with a client instead of waiting for a computer operator to process a request. It was a whole new world that continues to evolve.

Today

In my Information Systems class we talk about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the tools that we need to deploy, such as Mobile Device Management (MDM), in order to integrate consumer devices into the workplace. The key for technology departments is adaptability. The lines are blurred and the genie is not going back in the bottle so we need to make sure our data and enterprise are secure while working with these devices.

In a possible reversal of trends, Deloitte predicts what they call the re-enterprization of IT in the next few years. They point to current technologies such as wearables, 3D printing, and drones being embraced by the enterprise as evidence of that reversal. I am skeptical that the consumer trend is changing just yet but I will keep my eyes open.

Thoughts

Has the consumerization of IT helped you in your work or has it caused you pain as you deal with the consequences? I don’t miss the days of wearing a separate pager and I love being able to access data from any device at any time. I also realize the work that goes into the back end to make this access seamless and I appreciate the efforts of technologists who build bridges between consumer devices and the enterprise. Let me know your thoughts.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

The Necessity of a Service Catalog

Thomas Failor, AIM class of 2014.This is a guest post by AIM alum Thomas Failor, 2014, about the benefits and necessity of having an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service catalog in your IT or operations department.

Sometimes painful lessons are good ones in hindsight. In a previous life I moved from sales management to operations and one of my first tasks was to write a service catalog for my department’s offerings. Let’s just say my early efforts weren’t a hit, but with a little help I pulled it together. Learn from the error of my ways.

So what’s a service catalog? Service catalogs are just that, a catalog of the services your department provides. Formally identified in the 2007 Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3 as a suggested best practice, service catalogs have been used in well run organizations since at least the early 2000s. Most were justified in the return on investment of reducing cycle times and improving outcomes. With the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, service catalogs gained importance as a way to document processes for audits.

Everything your group does is likely regarded as a service for someone or some group in the company. Does your work stream have a service level agreement (SLA) you’re required to meet? If so, your group provides a service and you need a service catalog. The main reason service catalogs are so important is that they provide a vehicle for your group to communicate and negotiate SLA agreements with other groups or customers, both internal and external. Without a document to formalize these relationships, your group will be tone deaf to your customers and likely provide poor service.

Service catalogs have some common ingredients, but overall they are a managed document that describes:

  • what you do and what it’s called,
  • who owns your service,
  • when you do it,
  • to whom you provide the service,
  • how to request the service,
  • how service is delivered,
  • what you charge for the service,
  • any SLAs related to your service.

More formally, a service catalog is implemented “in a manner that facilitates the ‘registration, discovery, request, execution, and tracking of desired services for catalog users.’” – Wikipedia.

There are many free templates on the web to get you started writing a service catalog, but it may benefit you to produce a high-level diagram listing suppliers, inputs, processes, outputs, and customers of your particular business process to help identify who ALL of your customers are and what teams supply your various processes. You’d be surprised how little agreement there can be about who the customer is. Try it, you may be amazed at what you discover.

An ITIL trade group in the UK provides some detailed Service information on Catalogs on their website.

In essence, a service catalog provides two benefits. It allows you to clarify the services and service levels that you provide and it provides a clear advertisement to your customers as to your offerings. If nothing else, a service catalog is a great exercise in seeing your services from your internal and external customers, and hopefully acting to improve them over time.

How Safe is the Cloud?

padlocked cloudA lot of attention lately has been paid to the security of the cloud, particularly Apple’s iCloud service. There have been recent high profile celebrity hacks resulting in the sharing of photos that were thought to be private. The question I have been reading in the last couple of weeks, even in my local newspaper, is this: Is the cloud safe? The answer, maddeningly, is yes and no. This blog post will cover the definition of the cloud and how you can make the answer to that question “yes.”

Defining the Cloud

The cloud is really just a term for offsite storage. It is a convenient place to store files, whether they are photos, contact lists, or e-mails, so that you can access them from multiple devices in multiple locations. Say, for example, you take a picture from your smartphone and wish to view those same pictures from your tablet or your laptop or share them with friends. Rather than carrying those pictures around on a hard drive to view them on different devices or show friends, those pictures are stored in a common place, in the cloud storage. The cloud goes by different names such as iCloud, Google Drive, Google+, and Microsoft OneDrive. It also goes by names such as Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. Basically it is a common place to store, retrieve, and manipulate your files. The question then becomes: What if you want to take a picture but NOT store it in the cloud?

It’s All in the Sync

The key is to understand when your device is synchronizing with the cloud or with another device. In Android, for example, there is a Google Drive app that is an interface to help you download and sync files between your Android device and the cloud. You can also swap files between Android and your Google+ account or between Android and your Dropbox or Box account using a simple app.

Developers have done their best to make these apps intuitive and user friendly, but they have also masked the complexity of moving files back and forth to the cloud or to another device. As a result, some smartphone users just push the “sync all” button, which duplicates all files to the cloud. This is great for backup, but it also means that your files are now in a less secure area than just your phone. As recent events show, there are still some vulnerabilities in the cloud, and occasionally a cloud service is breached and personal data is compromised. One answer to this is to employ an application such as Encdroid for the Android OS, which encrypts your files and makes them more difficult to hack. Another solution is to understand where your files are and how they are getting there.

Thoughts

My challenge to you this week is to review your files and take an inventory of where you are storing everything. You may have signed up for a Google+ account and forgotten about it. When you get that new Android phone, however, you can bet the good folks at Google have a record of that account and would be happy to send all of your files to be backed up there. Be a savvy technology user and make sure you understand whether you are vulnerable and in what areas. In the end, that knowledge will make you and your data safer.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional, adjunct faculty for the University of Oregon, and academic director of the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

Managing a Farm Today—Agriculture Uses IT Too

I occasionally research how technology is being applied to different fields. Lately, I have been thinking about how technology is helping agriculture. Obviously others have been thinking the same thing but with more of a profit motive in mind. In May of this year, there was a conference held in Palo Alto, California, titled “Silicon Valley Agtech.” Their tagline is “Silicon Valley AgTech is where technology meets agriculture, Silicon Valley meets the Silicon Prairie, and innovation comes back to the farm.” Their aim is to bring together agriculture technology startups and venture capitalists to try to accelerate the interest and growth of this industry in Silicon Valley. Here are a few technologies that are aiding farmers and ranchers now.

Telematics

Telematics is the combination of telecommunications and informatics. It has to do with sending information to and from a remote object such as a vehicle. The GPS unit in newer cars is one such example of telematics, but the agriculture industry is using it in unique ways. GPS technology in newer tractors and farm implements can tell the driver precisely where to plow, plant, spray, and harvest. Harvest yield information can be uploaded in real time so that a farmer can tell immediately what to expect from his crop. Of course, all of this information exchange is going to result in a larger amount of data to be processed.

Big Data

Information collected in the field will include a new array of data points and could easily move into the area of big data. Some farm service companies are already getting into the cloud services business, specifically to collect, process, and make sense of data points. You can either upload data from the tractor thumb drive or upload the telematics-collected data directly to the service provider. Either way, the service provider stores, analyzes, and creates visualizations to help you understand where you can improve your farming and your crop yield.

Robotics

Farm equipment is not quite to the point where it can drive itself (think Google tractor) but it is getting close. Sprinkler pivots in large farm fields are often computer controlled with a remote or an app and require little human intervention when set up properly. There are farm service companies, however, that are developing tractors and other equipment to operate without a driver. With the telematics mentioned above and smart cameras, they will be able to operate within the parameters and confines of a field. This will free up the farmer to do higher value work such as analyzing the yield report sent by his cloud service provider.

Thoughts

Technology can be used to aid efficiencies in fields (no pun intended) as diverse as agricultural production. This also represents new opportunities for entrepreneurs and IT workers who have a passion for farm production and want to work to increase yields and decrease waste.

Do you know of other fields that are increasing their use of technology in a unique way? Let me know. I am always interested in learning more. 

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional, adjunct faculty for the University of Oregon, and academic director of the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at nigh

IT Trends: How Will You Access Your Data in the Years to Come?

shutterstock_91611515I have been thinking lately about information technology trends and I want to highlight a few in the blog this week. This helps me to keep up on the latest in technology and I hope that it helps you as well.

The Cloud

According to a recent list from Gartner, one of the emerging trends over the next couple of years is that the cloud will become the most important data repository. This will have significant impact on IT organizations in the fact that devices such as PCs and laptops will be merely a window into the data and the applications. The computer will not actually house information; it will all be hosted in the cloud. Laptops could become simple terminals and more computing will be pushed to the tablet, which could serve the same function. With this push to mobile devices, the desktop PC could drop out of the scene completely. Device management will change dramatically, especially as employees become even more mobile.

Mobile

Another trend identified by Gartner is an increasingly mobile workforce. This includes not only telecommuters, but also those working in a progressively 24/7 world on company-issued devices as well as on personal devices. The line is blurring between the two, and IT organizations need to get a handle on who and what devices have access to their proprietary information. This goes beyond a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy and enters into the area of network design with an eye toward mobile security.

Security

With the movement towards the cloud and mobile devices, Sophos—the network and server security vendor—predicts there will be more attacks on personal and corporate data. They also predict mobile devices will leave personal data more vulnerable to theft, particularly through the use of apps. With larger numbers of employees working remotely and passing corporate data across their mobile devices, this trend spells trouble for the IT organization. The spotlight will be on them to keep the corporate data safe on the inside and keep viruses and intruders on the outside. More emphasis will be put on security, particularly the mobile variant. The upside to all of this is an increase in opportunities for security professionals. According to Robert Half, the staffing specialists, security professionals are one of the technical specialties in highest demand. If the trend towards mobile and cloud computing continues, this demand will become even more acute.

Thoughts

One of the benefits of trend spotting is that it points to where future opportunities lie. There is a need now for security professionals, cloud computing professionals, and those that can integrate mobile platforms with enterprise applications. If you are at a crossroads in your career, I would explore one of these areas. If you are just starting your IT career or education, I think any of these will be solid fields for years to come, with options to branch out into the periphery. Have you seen any other IT trends worth noting? Let me know. I will highlight other trends in future blog posts.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional, adjunct faculty for the University of Oregon, and academic director of the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

Plan To Get Back To Business Fast After A Disaster

Broken phone, notebook and glasses, in the dirt and covered in dustThis week I want to write about something that you are probably not thinking about in these lazy days of summer: disaster recovery planning (DRP). Last time I checked disasters do not follow the calendar, weather related hazards aside. They can happen anytime, even when you are on vacation and not thinking about work. If a disaster were to strike your business, do you have a plan in place and does everyone know how to execute it? If not, this is a tickler to make that a priority. Here are some tips on how to build a plan and keep it current.

Priorities

First of all, you need to understand your most important business processes. This is an exercise not only for IT, but also for finance and accounting, marketing, manufacturing, and operations. In the event of a disaster, many people would argue that payroll should be restored first. Others would argue that customer facing processes should come first. Finally, others would argue that manufacturing should come first since without active inventory there is nothing to sell to the customers and therefore no revenue to fund the paychecks. Each business is different but the key is to decide what processes should be recovered first, second, and third, and everyone should be in agreement.

Drafting the Plan

Just as important as deciding the sequence of process recovery is writing and publishing the plan. What components go into a good plan? I recently came across a template that will help you draft your first plan or help you validate your current plan to make sure that you have all of the components necessary. It is important to get a peer review on this document to make sure that all agree on the necessary steps to recovery.

Regular Review

Once drafted and written, don’t let your plan become “shelfware,” never to see the light of day again. It is important that this document be reviewed on a regular basis. Your organization is dynamic and this document needs to reflect that. I have found that it is best to tie this review to other regular updates in your business. For example, when you are budgeting for the next fiscal year, why not review the DR to see what has changed in the last year or the last six months? What is about to change based on your proposed budget? Be proactive with the DR plan.

Thoughts

A disaster recovery plan is one component of a good business continuity plan. It outlines the first steps of how you are going to operate your business for a prolonged period while recovering from an outage, whether due to a storm or your customer-facing web page going offline. It is important to think carefully about how you are going to come back from that adversity. The worst time to develop a plan is in the middle of a disaster.

Take a minute this summer to review your plan with your team. When disaster strikes, you will be glad you did.

Author Kelly BrownAbout Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional, adjunct faculty for the University of Oregon, and academic director of the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at nigh