Mar 19, 2003
By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
Last time we talked about backing up the people in your organization. After all, as you'll remember from Kevin Craine's
Designing a Document Strategy, our world is about documents, technology and people!
We tossed in the idea that backing up people involved having assigned alternates for each mission critical job in the HVCO workflow. As you look across your organization, which is likely to be stretched thin already, you may be asking how you can possibly ask anyone to take on additional work. It is a fair question, and there are not easy answers. But, there is a business case to be made.
First, think about what happens if you experience an interruption in availability of your building. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tornados happen every year, and when they do, it is likely that all key personnel will not be available. If only one person knows the correct order for running the production jobs so that they print correctly, you have a problem. If only one employee knows how to walk the check printing program through its paces, you have a problem.
So, if we agree that having single points of knowledge is not conducive to
business continuity, what can you do to cross train and bring more people in the
production loop up to speed on the big HVCO picture? Start with identifying the
most critical applications.
Think you know what they are! Check with the application owners before you make big decisions. One document manager in the Northwest shared that after an earthquake they went into continuity mode. They made sure that the jobs that were critical could be processed at an alternate company location in the next state.
Then, after they moved the jobs and had them running, they patted themselves on the back and told themselves how great the plan worked.
Shortly after that the phone began to ring. It turned out that the jobs they so carefully made arrangements for were not the mission critical jobs. They were critical jobs, to be sure, but not the key jobs. The mission critical jobs involved getting checks out to clients in a timely manner because there were legal issues involved in how long they could be delayed. No one had asked the application owners.
In this case the check stock was available and it was possible to get the applications and data moved quickly so that the obligations could be met. In the worst possible scenario, though, the document manager could imagine the situation where the check stock was not available and the print job would not run at the remote location. They had never tested
therefore didn't know if it would or not.
So, start by identifying the mission critical HVCO applications and then check with the applications owners and your legal department to gain concurrence. That is your first critical step.
Next time ? what you should do with the information once you have your final, verified list of mission critical applications!
Let's pick this up next time! If this is valuable, drop us a line at pm@outputlinks.com!