» 2010 » June Archives

Early in my career, I worked in a manufacturing environment. And though we were not yet a disciplined SixSigma shop, we were obligated by customer requirements to conduct, on a monthly basis, 7-Step Root Cause Analysis on the top 10 issues causing downtime or product defects on our assembly lines.

I learned two important things from this process that I believe applies to business continuity and disaster recovery exercises and testing.  Read More

I’ve always been the type to read the instructions… on nearly everything.  When I was a kid, I loved putting together plastic models of cars and airplanes.  The process always went smoothly because I read the directions first.  Read More

Or: How to NOT Alienate Your Friends and Contacts

I saw today that Twitter is releasing a new service/app that provides another level of integration with competing-yet-complimentary social networks.  Read More

In December 2009, my friend Mike Ellis (@EmergCommNetwrk, website) posted an excerpt of Mark Prutsalis’ (@LivingPrepared, website) August 13, 2009 article Use of Twitter as an Emergency Notification Service. Both became relevant this past week when Twitter experienced serious outage issues making its site inaccessible and API unavailable.

In the article, Mark argues that government agencies should not use Twitter as an emergency notification service.  His points are valid and applicable to private sector businesses and non-profit organizations as well.  Read More

I believe a lot of managers and board members hold a number of misconceptions regarding business continuity and disaster recovery testing and exercises.  Over the years, I’ve heard many argue about what makes a test successful or not, and how to best present test results relative to business objectives when management, auditors and regulators are pushing for ‘successful tests’.   Read More