It’s all about COMMUNICATION!!
It seems that every time we begin working with a new client and we start reviewing their business continuity plan (that’s huge down here in South Florida with the hurricanes) we always find out that the expectations of Management are different then what the system can actually do. Why is that?
Let me give you an example from a recent meeting that we present to the Board of Directors of a non-profit. There were four people from the client and me and Jorge Azcuy, our Director of Technical Services. When we got to part about Business Continuity one of the owners said, that’s an area we don’t need to focus on, we’re good.
The Jorge asked him to explain and he said “in the event of a disaster we ‘flip a switch’ and all systems come up in our back up location”. Jorge then responds “that is not the case”. Then the client says “true or false, we have a switch that once flipped all systems automatically fail over” which Jorge responded “absolutely false”. What the owner said next I couldn’t include in this post due to vulgarity.
This is another classic case where the former IT company either didn’t explain properly how the system worked or were afraid to approach the owner. And the owner, being a non-technical person, doesn’t realize the massive effort and expense of having an “automatic failover”. Had the two parties sat down and discussed this clearly this miscommunication could have easily been avoided.
We try to be as transparent as possible and provide the business stakeholders with a list of all systems and applications and our estimated recovery time for each one in the event of an outage. Then they identify the business requirements for each system recovery and we get to work on implementing a solution that meets their needs. This way everything is clearly communicated and there are no surprises.
It’s amazing how much smoother IT would be if everyone just openly communicated a bit more.
