Apr 8, 2003
By Pat McGrew, EDP
Welcome to the HVCO Data Management Pavilion of OutputLinks.com!
Do you have your audited list of mission critical applications yet? It is a hard exercise, isn?t it? Part of the problem is that some applications that appear critical may not be critical in a time of crisis. Other applications become critical because of the crisis. It take input from the application owners, the legal folks, and upper management to come to a consensus of what is mission critical and to apply the needed resources to ensure that they can be executed in an emergency.
Once you have identified the applications, identify who has responsibility for them. In this case you need to know everything you can learn about the application, including where the data comes from, where the document framework comes from, and how the documents are distributed. Note that I did not say ?printed? because today you may have multi-channel delivery requirements. You may have requirements to print and mail, but you may also have obligations to route to web delivery or to use an email delivery function.
This is usually the point where you discover the key person in the application workflow. It may be a programmer, a document workflow specialist, the application owner, or someone in the print/mail chain. This is the person who knows every little secret about the application. They know that it has to be run at a certain time of day because it uses so much of the CPU. Or, they know that certain parts of the application have to be run in a certain order or data becomes corrupted. Perhaps they know the secret to getting the job printed ? that it has to print on a certain physical device or problems emerge. None of these things is unusual in your average enterprise HVCO shop. The process required for the job to process evolves over time.
However, in a time of crisis, what will it take to get the job to run? This is why you want to identify all of the people who have some understanding of the application. Once you have all of the people who have some familiarity with the application identified, it?s time to get everyone educated on all of the facets of the application, and to document what it takes to get the job processed.
Does it require special electronic forms or pre-printed paper? If it is a job that produces checks, is there a supply of check stock offsite where it can be accessed? What about the appropriate envelops? Have the personnel in the back-up site been brought up to date on the application and how to process it? Have appropriate electronic forms, fonts, graphics and signatures been refreshed at the backup site?
Now that you have the basis for the plan, did you notice that it doesn?t have to take a lot to get everyone in the document workflow knowledgeable enough to handle the job in a crisis? That should be your goal for every job in the HVCO shop, but start with the mission critical applications. Weather and other crisis can happen at any time.
We?ll open up a new topic next time! If this is valuable, drop us a line at pm@outputlinks.com!