Mar 5, 2003
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
We got back to looking at Business Continuity last time with the admonition that the need to activate the plan doesn?t only come from weather-related disasters or even a terrorist attack. It can be as simple as a water main break or as complex as a problem in another nearby business. When the need for the plan arrives, the reason is almost irrelevant. You simply have to be prepared or business will suffer.
There is more to business continuity planning, however, than having your finger on where the productions files are and how to get the data to an appropriate offsite facility. There are also the people behind the data that hold critical knowledge. Have you thought about what happens when the key systems analyst or application owner is not available?
Any day of any week a catastrophic accident can happen that might cause you to lose a key person. We don?t often think of it, and the actual jobs that each person handles tend to evolve without documentation. As a person moves from job to job in the organization, sometimes they take key functions of their previous position with them. Has that happened in your shop? Look around. Who do you go to when a key application fails in processing, or a print job has a problem and needs to be re-run. In many shops it is not the application owner, but some else who used to own the application who knows more the history.
Now think about our current business environment. While the possibility of a war is at hand many shops are losing key personnel to the call up of reservists. What happens if, even without a problem that forces the closing of your own data center, you lose key personnel? Are you r processes and procedures well defined and well documented to the point where someone else can step in and handle the problems that might arise?
Think carefully before you jump to an answer. We all want to believe that we have the situation well in hand, but in fact, in many shops, there are many pieces of key information that reside in a single person. It is usually a senior person, but not always. And, if you take that person out of the picture, problem solving can become an exercise in frustration.
This is yet another reason that completes documentation of all of the exception processing options should be a part of the business continuity plan. For each point in the process, from application generation to delivery to the mail facility, key points should be identified and alternative procedures established. Every key person should be identified, as should their back up.
What? You don?t have staff assigned to back up positions for each step of the HVCO process? You are not alone. It is rare to find that people are cross-trained in other applications, but it should become a standard part of the development of the business continuity plan and making it ready for implementation.
Let?s pick this up next time! If this is valuable, drop us a line
at pm@outputlinks.com!