Famous Places & Things

Taj Mahal in Agra, India	Chad Goode – Signing the impact map during the 2008 California Shakeout earthquake exercise kick-off at CalTech.	Big Ben – London, England – 1998
Me at the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France	Me with the back of Notre Dame Cathedral behind me.	Me and Robin Hood, outside Nottingham Castle. Nottingham, England (2008).
On a river boat dinner cruise on the Hudson. The spotlights shining into the clouds commemorate the former location of the World Trade Center.	Me outside of Mel’s Diner in Phoenix, AZ

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Photo Album: Famous Places & Things was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

Related posts:

1. Photo Album: England (2008)
2. Photo Album: London, England (1998)
3. Photo Album: Taiwan (2008)

Ideally, we would all like to see this change. We would like to see business continuity planners conduct thorough BIA’s and provide IT with a prioritized list of applications and services and what availability and recovery capabilities are required for each.  Because a lot of organizations, even in 2010, still have not embraced business continuity planning or have not integrated their BCM and DRP programs under a single umbrella, IT is left to guess and to deliver cost-effective disaster recovery solutions without the business impact information required to do so.

Knowing that we can’t change the world all at once, and BCM/DRP programs mature at different rates in different organizations, I have an approach that I believe helps plan from an IT perspective… and lays the foundation for a mature and comprehensive program in the future. The trick is to look at the IT/IS department as a business within the business.

Even in organizations where IT is the business, there is a portion of IT that is a business-supporting or business-enabling function.  This IT function includes those activities not directly tied to services provided to the company’s customers (ie, not directly tied to generating revenue).  For example, in non-IT companies, application hosting is a business-support function. The applications are required for the business to operate efficiently, but the company’s customers often do not see/use these apps directly.

In tech companies that provide Software as a Service (SaaS), application hosting may very well be part of the service portfolio provided to the company’s customers.

However, in both cases, IT does a lot more and provides a number of other services that support hosting applications. IT staff manage network connectivity, provide capacity planning, change and configuration management, provide moves, adds and changes on request, manage information security, technology vendors, software licensing, compliance and other service providers and provide support for the hosted applications, the entire infrastructure and even the desktops.

Despite this fact, I see senior management tasking IT with providing disaster recovery for mission-critical applications, and IT then building out infrastructure solutions and recovery plans starting at the application level. They start by asking the question, “How can we recover this application and restore the data within the timeframe allotted to us by the business?”  This is definitely a challenge… because this is not the right question… not yet anyway.

What I suggest is that one look at IT as a stand-alone service provider and conduct an IT-specific BIA from this perspective. Look at IT as a separate business with its own customers, suppliers, revenue and expenses.  Identify your ‘revenue generating services’; those services you provide directly to your customers (ie, the rest of the company) and separate those from the back-end services you provide to support your ‘revenue generating activities’.

With this in mind, you can begin building your IT business continuity plan and program with a focus on improving the IT organization’s ability to continue providing services to your customers.  This will drive you to identify and prioritize not just the core infrastructure requirements for hosting applications, but also the management tools, crisis response and management plans and other non-technical processes needed.

In a disaster event, your recovery will first focus on recovering these core infrastructure components, services and management processes… and only then can you even think about recovering customer’s applications.

Keep in mind, as it is often missed when planning recovery from the application level, that core infrastructure and IT process recovery times have to be figured into application RTO’s.  This means, then, that every core infrastructure component necessarily has a much lower RTO than any of the company’s most critical applications.

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Business Continuity & IT as a ‘Business within the Business’ was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

Related posts:

1. The 5 R’s of Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Planning
2. LinkedIn Q&A: Business Continuity & 100% IT Availability?
3. Letting Software Dictate Your Business Continuity Program?

This isn’t really a review of either. Instead, it’s more of a wish-list… for what I wish either Yodlee or Mint were, but alas, they are not.

First, I admit it. I love Quicken. I’ve used some version of Quicken’s desktop product since I migrated from MS Money in 2002. Well, actually, when I went anti-Windows and switched to FreeBSD in 2004, I couldn’t get Quicken to work with Wine and gave GNUCash a whirl for a few months.  But eventually I returned to my beloved financial management software (the only reason I returned to Windows). I currently use Quicken 2008 Home and Business.

And my wife, well, she’s a financial analyst. She likes crunching numbers more than shopping for shoes, if you can believe it. (Ok, that’s probably stretching it a bit.)

My point is that we’re not just managing our weekly allowances here. We’re serious about our finances and our financial futures.

What do we like about Quicken?

While we have a lot of gripes with Quicken that I won’t go into, none of them prevent us from getting the job done. Sometimes we just have to be creative or work a bit harder to understand how Quicken works.

For starters, we love the automated account aggregation features. We’ve gone so far as to move nearly all of our accounts to banks that support updating via Quicken’s OneStep Update feature because it saves so much time in reconciling accounts, analyzing our 401k’s, IRA’s and brokerage accounts and tracking loan and credit card balances.

We also love the ability to categorize transactions and then tag categories to specific tax line-items. Though I use QuickBooks for my business accounting, we both incur a not-insignificant amount of unreimbursed work-related expenses. We also donate to charity, have capital gains, have healthcare-related expenses, student loans and mortgage interest. While tax time is never ‘a breeze’, it certainly isn’t the nightmare it would be without Quicken.

Finally, we love Quicken’s reporting. We use the custom reporting features extensively to drill down and better understand every aspect of our spending and our investments, to compare to previous periods and to ensure that we’re always improving our situation.  We don’t have to experiment or guess.

So why would I want to move away from Quicken?

Perhaps my wife and I are peculiar in this respect, or perhaps not. We each have our own computers for normal, day-to-day use and we share an old laptop for our “family” activities. Turns out the only thing installed on said laptop is Quicken.

Ideally, we’d both love to have access to our Quicken data from our own machines, with the data itself stored on our shared file-server. I know there are convoluted or 3rd-party ways to make this happen, but the fact is that Quicken is not designed to run this way. All of the work-arounds have some limitation we’re unwilling to accept or risk we’re unwilling to take.

And, just recently, I found out that I’m going to be traveling extensively. Though we share the laptop with Quicken installed, we each take responsibility for updating our individual accounts, categorizing transactions and making manual entries when required. As I anticipate being on the road for weeks and possibly months at a time, I feel horrible about making my wife take care of all of our finances alone.

Wouldn’t it be great if Quicken existed ‘in the cloud’?

My wife initially suggested that I install some Remote Desktop application so that I could access the shared laptop over the internet and keep my accounts up-to-date. To me, that seemed really cludgy and so 2004. I asked her to give me some time to investigate our online options as I was sure there was a solution out there.  Here’s what I found:

Aggregation

Both Yodlee and Mint offer the account aggregation features that Quicken does… but not as nicely. For example, let’s say you make a transfer from a savings account to a checking account. Quicken, Yodlee and Mint will all download the transfer transaction from the banks for both accounts.

But Quicken goes one step further and, while the transfer shows in both accounts, it considers the transfer a single transaction. You can tag it, classify it, add a memo to it, change the description or whatever, and the changes show up in both accounts. In Yodlee and Mint, these are separate transactions and to get the reporting to work correctly, you have to edit the transaction twice, once for each account.

Budgeting

Both Yodlee and Mint offer budgeting features, if you want to call it that. What they really offer is the ability to set a monthly goal for each expense category, let you report on how your actual spending compares to your budget and can alert you when a category is getting close to going over your goal. It’s the old ‘envelope budget’ method I suppose.

Perhaps this is enough for someone in high school managing their income from their part-time job at the local cinema. Adults are more sophisticated and require more sophisticated budgeting and forecasting tools. Both Yodlee and Mint fail miserably in this area.

Taxes

Yodlee and Mint both have, for individual transactions, a checkbox to identify that transaction as “tax related”.  I am at a complete loss as to how this could be helpful to anyone.

Hopefully Mint, being owned by Inuit (the guys who make Quicken and TurboTax) will come up with some tighter tax integration features… and preferably let customers tag categories to specific tax line-items like Quicken does today.

Accessibility

Both Yodlee and Mint have one up on Quicken. They are accessible anytime and from anywhere you have a web browser and internet connection… including your mobile phone. Our instance of Quicken sits securely on a laptop and is accessible only from that laptop. And while I could go through the trouble of setting up a VPN tunnel… well, that’s a lot of trouble. The Remote Desktop solution is, unfortunately, the only solution I see as viable.

Conclusion

As I mentioned before, if you’re managing your income from a part-time job or managing your weekly allowance from your parents, the ‘snapshot’ view of your transactions provided by the likes of Yodlee and Mint might be sufficient. But it’s exactly that… a snapshot view. Neither Yodlee nor Mint allow for managing your finances.

And while Quicken does nearly everything very well, the fact that it is a desktop app is severely limiting to those of us who ‘tele-home’ (my newly-coined term for those of us who have to spend significant amounts of time away from home, yet still want to feel a part of it).

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Mint vs Yodlee vs Quicken was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

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Tonight I saw that Mashable posted a link to their Buzz stream, so I followed them.

And now I’m perplexed by a few questions: Why would one choose Twitter over Google Buzz, or Buzz over Twitter? And why would anyone use both?

Twitter

As a former/reformed IT-guy, the recent and ongoing technical issues experienced with Twitter is disgusting. Besides the issues themselves, I’m also a bit irked by the lack of outcry by Twitter users. I mean, there is a little complaining going on, but there’s been no talk of a mass exodus in as an attempt to convince Twitter to do any better.

Further, I’m finding it hard to identify anything that I really *like* about it. I like the ‘micro-blogging’ service both for posting my own short thoughts and passing on links, and also for getting the same from others. But in a sense, I don’t really use Twitter itself. I hate the website interface and do all of my Twitter interactions through Tweetdeck, Hootsuite or other 3rd party apps. And Tweetdeck supports Buzz now, so from a user perspective, there’s little difference.

The other, and much bigger, issue I have with Twitter is that it has become much less of a social networking tool and more of a social marketing tool. Despite all the talk about ‘engagement’ and ‘relationship building’, if I stopped following everyone who was ultimately trying to sell me something, I’d be following very few indeed.

Google Buzz

So, for me, based on how I use ‘micro-blogging’, Buzz is becoming more and more attractive as a more reliable alternative.

The downside is that I don’t know anyone else using Buzz. And while I have been using GoogleApps for a long while, I had to create a new Gmail account just for Buzz and I haven’t yet merged my contacts.

The other concern is, well, Buzz is a Google product. If you haven’t read it, check out 5 Reasons You Should Be Afraid of Google on Cracked.com.

Different, but the same

When it comes to competition, I find that I choose one solution per niche and use it exclusively. For example, while I have a profile on Plaxo and SmallerIndiana (and until recently, FastPitch… and I refuse to provide a link), I use LinkedIn exclusively for my business networking needs.

For keeping up with friends and family, I dropped MySpace and Yahoo in favor of Facebook (until I recently dropped FB preemptively in favor of GoogleMe).  I was never inclined to investigate Orkut or any others.

For video sharing, I use YouTube, but not Vimeo. For pictures, I use Picasa and not Flickr. It seems that there is just too much redundancy to use multiple services for the same thing.

Though Tweetdeck makes it easy to use both Twitter and Buzz, I have a feeling that I will eventually have to choose one and drop the other. As someone NOT engaged in online marketing, cross-posting to both seems tedious and counter-productive.

Is this how most people approach their online social networks?

What are your thoughts? Using Buzz and not Twitter? Refuse to use Buzz? Do you use multiple nearly-equivalent services? I’d like to hear about it.

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Twitter vs Buzz was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

Related posts:

1. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn: Syndication and Respecting Social Network Cultures
2. Twitter for Emergency Management & Crisis Communications
3. Facebook, Marketing and My Privacy

I learned two important things from this process that I believe applies to business continuity and disaster recovery exercises and testing. First, what appears to be the cause of a failure on the surface rarely is.  Second, even if we identify the true root cause of a failure, if we don’t take measures to remedy that root cause, the entire process is a waste.

With respect to using a formal process for BC/DR testing, unless your company is in a regulated industry or is at the top of a supply chain where some vendors are extremely critical, I recommend taking time to understand the fundamental concepts of root cause analysis and then modify the steps to fit your own company culture and existing processes.

Root Cause Analsysis and DMAIC

My experience tells me the best starting point for ensuring test results find their way back into making the plan better is the DMAIC process.

D: Define

M: Measure

A: Analyze

I: Improve

C: Control

Each one of these words/concepts/phases in root cause analysis is a separate discipline in itself, and each one is key.  Don’t skip steps!

Defining the Problem

Much of the time, especially when in meetings and brainstorming, we have a tendency to jump right to throwing out solutions to problems before we really understand what the problem is.  It is imperative at this stage to focus specifically on defining the issue.  And we define it objectively, without placing blame.  Further, we want to, as best we can, define it in quantitative terms so that we can measure the extent of the problem.

Finally, it’s important to focus on the scope of the problem, identify what other systems or processes are impacted and which are not.

The final step, or it could be first, is to designate a problem owner and stakeholders.  Just like managing a project, the process is much more effective with a single champion who is accountable for solving the problem.

Measuring the Problem

If we have defined the problem well, the results should be predictable and repeatable, and therefore measurable.  In BC/DR we may measure business process resumption simply with a pass/fail, worked/didn’t work metric, or we may measure customer calls missed or revenue lost of the data is available.  If we’re talking about data and IT, we may measure the number of accounts affected, users impacted, records recovered versus lost or measure time relative to RTO’s and RPO’s.

Again, the trick in defining and measuring the problem is to narrow the problem down to a point where we can measure the extent to which the problem impacts recovery efforts so that we can, in turn, measure the extent corrective actions actually improve those efforts.

Analyzing the Problem

Now, for the first time, we get to try and figure out what’s causing the problem.  There are several different methods to do this, from simple brainstorming to drawing diagrams.  I like the 5 Why’s approach because most organizations are not using statistical process control on BC/DR planning and trying to is probably overkill.  The 5 Why’s approach is simple and it generally works.

The idea behind 5 Why’s is just asking Why? through five iterations.  Start with “Why did we have this problem?” (referring to the problem identified earlier).  Here’s an example:

1. Why did we have the problem?

A. Because the DR plan was not up-to-date.

2. Why was the DR plan not up-to-date?

A. Because Joe didn’t update it.

3. Why didn’t Joe update it?

A. Because he was busy with other priorities.

4. Why does Joe have other priorities over updating his DR plan?

A. Because his performance metrics are based on activities not related to his DR plan.

5. Why are performance metrics not tied to DR planning?

A. We don’t have a policy in-place that tells managers to hold employees accountable for the DR-related activites.

Ok, so you see how it works.  The problem might be related to the plan not being up-to-date, but by drilling down we can see there is a deeper root cause.  And what we typically find is that this root cause is not just the cause of this single failure, but is generally a fundamental failure with the potential to impact other areas, processes or systems.

Improving the Situation

Sometimes the Analysis phase will point very closely to a good solution. But even so, it’s good to brainstorm and work out the details of several options.  For each, understand the time required and conduct a cost/benefit analysis.

Also evaluate each proposal to ensure that implementing a particular solution does not break or cause problems elsewhere. Especially when we are talking about systems and applications, changes can have significant impact and should be passed through a formal change control process (a subject for another time).

The final component of Improvement goes back to the metrics identified in the Measure phase. Know ahead of time how and to what extent the improvement is expected to address the problem. This will be important in future testing to ensure the improvement was implemented correctly and yielded the expected positive results.

Once the best solution is selected, depending on the size and scale, it should be implemented either through a simple Corrective Action process or, if needed, a separate, stand-alone project.

Control

Even if we implement the right solution to the true root cause of a problem, if we neglect it over time, the problems resurface. Hence, especially in BC/DR where many of our solutions are going to be based on changes to processes, the organization needs a mechanism to verify that the process remains under control. This frequently takes the form of an internal process audit.

In designing our improvement, then, implementing the solution is not enough on its own. We need to additionally define how we will continuously measure the process going forward and verify that the solution continues to prevent the original problem or reduces the frequency of occurrence.

Conclusion

In business continuity and disaster recovery testing, many organizations take the findings and results from tests and exercises and fix the immediate issues without addressing the root cause. Doing so means the organization continues to face many of the same related issues repeatedly. Incorporating a semi-formal root cause analysis process following each test, and for each problem identified, can result in better and more reliable plans, and a more efficient and cost-effective test and exercise program.

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Disaster Recovery Test Results and What to Do With Them was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

Related posts:

1. Disaster Recovery: Tests vs Exercises vs Practice
2. The 5 R’s of Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Planning
3. Letting Software Dictate Your Business Continuity Program?

As I grew older, I learned the value of changing my own oil (well, not MY oil, but the oil in my car), replacing brake pads, belts and spark plugs.  It turns out most automotive maintenance is fairly simple… if you read the instructions.

And when it came to assembling Sauder furniture, I was a pro… because I always read the instructions.

When I bought my first house, I did so with the intention of becoming a DIY ‘weekend warrior’.  I was amazed that I was able to, with no prior experience, wire electrical outlets, hang and finish drywall, lay hardwood flooring and even build a bar… all by just reading the instructions!

Now that I’m married, I cook frequently.  For most of my life I was intimidated by the thought of cooking because I’ve eaten good stuff and bad.  I always thought it was a tremendously difficult skill that took years of training, trial and error… and not everyone gets it.  One day, to surprise my wife, I downloaded a simple apricot pork chop recipe I found on the internet.  I read it thoroughly, bought the ingredients, followed the directions and it turned out fantastic!

Time and time again, I’ve learned that I don’t have to re-invent. While of course there are some things that one just has to learn by him/herself, there are many things that mankind, as a collective, has learned and documented.

In general, this axiom has proven true: if someone has taken the time to write instructions for completing a task that you’re about to do, and you have access to those instructions… you should take the time to read through them prior to undertaking the task.  Even if you don’t follow those directions to the T, knowing where you’re going to end up and how you’re supposed to get there is tremendously valuable in saving time, effort and frustration.

I wish I had considered all of the above before tonight, when I proceeded to make some really simple macaroons.  I read through the list of ingredients, whisked them up in the bowl, spooned them onto the cookie sheet and, only when I checked again to see the recommended oven temperature, did I finish reading the procedure.  I really should have whipped the egg whites and folded in the coconut and sugar.

My macaroons turned out exactly unlike anything edible.

Lesson learned.

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. The Importance of Reading Instructions was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

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I saw today that Twitter is releasing a new service/app that provides another level of integration with competing-yet-complimentary social networks. The articles tout the ability to cross-post (aka, “syndicate”) from Twitter to both Facebook and LinkedIn.  For those of us using all three services daily, we know that’s been around awhile. Nothing new there.

The real treat is that now Twitter will allow you to quickly find and follow your friends on Facebook and connections on LinkedIn that also have Twitter accounts.

I actually found this by accident on LinkedIn the other day and it’s quite awesome.  I tried last night to attach to Facebook with no success due to technical issues on Facebook’s side. The latest update says Facebook has blocked the application.

But with great power comes great responsibility

I’ve seen it happen, and I think we need to get the word out.  It seems to me that social media/networking experts, small business and techies are likely the only people really using all three networks.  Most other people are primarily using one or two and have little knowledge of the third.  For example, the stay-at-home mom talking about her soaps knows about Twitter and Facebook with no understanding of LinkedIn.  The CIO of a Fortune 1000 company is on LinkedIn for business, Facebook for personal (maybe) but has not felt compelled to learn much about Twitter.

In the end, I think these new features are going to cause significant alienation if care isn’t taken to understand the respective ‘culture’ of each social network.

So, for those using, or planning to use, these features and cross-post from Twitter to Facebook or LinkedIn, here is some info you might find helpful.

Twitter

To be blunt about it, Twitter is a narcissistic social media platform where everyone blasts their information into the ether to be picked up by anyone and everyone who is listening.  To listen, just go to their profile page and read their posts.  If you kinda’ like them and would like a shortcut, create a list, add them to it and periodically take a look at that list to read through the latest updates.  If you really want to see everything they have to say when they say it, you can “follow” them. This effectively puts their broadcasts into your inbound stream.

There isn’t really a single ‘culture’ on Twitter.  People talk about all sorts of things. Some people tweet a message less than once a week, and others tweet more than 50 messages per day.  Some people just tweet motivational quotes, others just re-tweet those people and some people actually reply to posts and try to interact on a more personal level. The cool thing about Twitter is that anything goes and there are no real rules.

It’s common for Twitter users to follow hundreds, if not thousands, of other users.  This can be overwhelming to new users as Twitter lacks any built-in filtering or prioritizing functionality beyond the ‘list’ feature.  It’s also common for individuals to duplicate their own posts throughout the day or week, as it’s understood that most people aren’t going to read every post in their stream since their last sign-on.

Facebook

I probably don’t have to say much about Facebook.  It’s different than Twitter in that, while you could potentially broadcast to the world, most people I know connect with others they actually know, either friend, family or business contacts.  Additionally, businesses are establishing a presence on Facebook to interact with customers, but that’s a different animal.

From an individual’s perspective, the big difference between Facebook and Twitter is that Facebook is locked down just a bit more, which gives people a more personal experience when interacting with their ‘friends’.  And since Facebook ‘friends’ tend to have some relationship outside of Facebook, most shy away from alienating each other with 50 posts per day advertising their small business or forwarding tons of work-related links. Instead, posts often tend to be more of a personal nature compared to Twitter. For most people, it’s a great platform to connect, reconnect and stay connected with friends, family members and colleagues.

It also seems that Facebook recognized the lack of filtering issues with Twitter and incorporated a solution into their newsfeed interface. Though many people don’t like it and they see it as Facebook determining what news is important, it works well for those with a lot of friends by highlighting more popular items and filtering the rest.

LinkedIn

If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s a social network, but with a culture completely different than that of Twitter and Facebook.  While there are always exceptions, LinkedIn is for professional networking, making business-related connections and building professional relationships.  While “open networkers” violate the rule, the premise behind what makes LinkedIn valuable is that you actually have a solid business relationship with each of your connections such that you can and are willing to make referrals, offer recommendations and connect others.

It’s been my impression and experience that people are not using LinkedIn to find out about movie reviews, local bands, discuss politics, religion or share recipes.  People on LinkedIn are there to build relationships, grow their business or advance their careers.

For a while now, LinkedIn has had a ‘status update’ feature that allows users to post a short message.  It used to ask “What are you working on?”, prompting users to stick to business, work, career-related topics.  Today, the homepage, by default, shows the last three updates in your network. You can then click the “more” link to see the latest 8-10 or so.

So What About the Cross-Posting, Already…

Yeah. With Twitters ability to cross-post, the potential to alienate your friends and business contacts is a very real one. On Twitter, people follow and unfollow others for a myriad of reasons and the advice to individuals is to not take it personally when someone stops following you. However, for most people, our Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts are too valuable and we want to encourage relationships, not drive people away.

In terms of post quantity vs quality, I think of it like this:

• Twitter: High Quantity / Quality varies and no one cares
• Facebook: Medium Quantity / Quality will vary, appropriate to your specific audience/friends
• LinkedIn: Low Quantity / High Quality to project the best professional image of yourself and your company

Strategically, it boils down to:

• Twitter: Use it for self-promotion, but, since it’s 100% public, make sure you are filtering your own posts and not getting too personal. Provide information that’s helpful and relevant to your target audience.
• Facebook: Keep in touch with friends and family, but keep in mind that you probably have business contacts too.  Use FB’s new privacy features to filter overly-personal or risqué updates to only the people you really want to see it.
• LinkedIn: Use the status updates feature sparingly to establish yourself as an expert in your field, a professional, and to stay “BOB & TOM” (“Best of Breed” and “Top of Mind”).  Since your connections only see the last 8-10 updates from all their contacts, too many irrelevant updates from one individual fills this up quickly and, as a result, quickly becomes annoying.

Solutions?

Fortunately, both there are solutions available for both Facebook and LinkedIn to help the situation and make syndicating tweets more appropriate to these other network cultures.

For Facebook, check out Selective Tweets.  It connects Facebook and Twitter accounts and allows you to cross-post, but further allows you to filter what you tweet.  You can end your tweets with the #fb hashtag and ONLY those tweets will show up on Facebook.

LinkedIn’s Twitter app has similar functionality. Once installed, go to the Settings tab and enable the selective tweets option.  Use the #in hashtag when you want a tweet to also appear on your LinkedIn status.

Using these features allows you to tweet all you want, and selectively cross-post/syndicate only the relevant tweets to the appropriate network.    Hence, it prevents you from flooding your Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections with all of your irrelevant tweets so you don’t violate the network’s established culture and risk alienating your friends and professional connections.

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn: Syndication and Respecting Social Network Cultures was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

Related posts:

1. Facebook, Marketing and My Privacy
2. Twitter for Emergency Management & Crisis Communications

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. FEMA Billboard: You are here… was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

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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.

Mark, prophetically, highlights two basic concerns:

• Twitter is down frequently for a myriad of reasons, and seems particularly sensitive to capacity issues especially during high-profile, highly visible disasters and incidents, and
• Twitter has not yet fully implemented a means to validate user accounts, which diminishes the reliability of information dispersed.

Both of these concerns, fulfilling Mark’s prophecy, presented themselves beautifully in the last few weeks; most notably the above-mentioned outages and intense public out-cry over the Gulf Oil Spill (#oilspill).  Political pundits used Twitter to blast their competing parties, Gulf-area locals brought minute-by-minute updates of their experiences and BP, already suffering and PR nightmare via normal media outlets, had to contend with a fake Twitter account, @BPGlobalPR (article).  This account, that early on many believed to be the official mouthpiece of the oil giant, continues to spout inaccuracies and make outrageous, politically-motivated, reputation-damaging claims.

To be fair, BP’s real Twitter account is @BP_America.

It is important to distinguish between two different, yet relevant and interrelated, concepts:  emergency communications and crisis communications.  The former deals specifically with dispersing critical information to affected parties and/or to response and relief personnel in the field.  The latter, as a sub-specialty of public relations, deals with protecting public perception of an organization and to defend its reputation.

Participating in the live reporting and re-tweeting of event information does not make the social network expert in emergency and disaster management.

- Mark Prutsalis

While Mark’s argument deals specifically with government agencies and emergency management, the BP fiasco demonstrates how Twitter’s shortcomings should make private-sector organizations think twice about using social media for emergency notifications and communications.  It should further highlight the need for addressing, in a formal crisis management strategy developed long before it’s needed, if and how social media will be used  as a crisis management and communications tool.

Twitter apologists and social media marketing experts argue that no one is urging companies to use Twitter exclusively, but only to integrate it into their crisis communications along with other tools and services.  To some extent, this is true.   However, rather than promoting its use, the crisis management plan should specifically detail how Twitter and other social networking platforms will be used and, more importantly, NOT used during an incident.  For example, Twitter should not be relied upon to deliver authoritative quotations or official comments, but instead point to and promote an official website where the reader can find press releases, status updates and other relevant information.  Even so, there is a danger of the public becoming overly dependent on Twitter status updates for these links. Hence, it is important to integrate social media to supplement the organization’s overall communications strategy, not to replace it nor even as a critical component.

Marketing, in general, and crises, specifically, require control of ‘the message’.  Unfortunately for most organizations in today’s connected world, as we saw recently with Tiger Woods, Toyota and BP, controlling that message is not easy.  Gaining control of that message after-the-fact is nearly impossible.  Organizations must take steps today to develop their emergency and crisis management strategies and  to clarify internally and to their customers how official information will be distributed.  And while Twitter may have a role in some organizations’ strategies, it should be limited to supplementing other methods and delivery mediums over which the organization has control.

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Twitter for Emergency Management & Crisis Communications was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

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I think much of the confusion comes from the very sloppy way we, as practitioners, use terminology that has meaning in common speech outside our specialty.

The following describes how I distinguish testing, exercises and practice, and will hopefully serve to help others in the field to explain the differences and how success and failure in each can mean very different things for the organization.

Tests

One activity that takes place in organizations involves validating that a proposed recovery or business resumption process works under ideal circumstances.  This can take the form of working from a “plan” or, although discouraged, letting an employee do what he knows how to do without any documented guidance.  The key here is that at this stage, the recovery process is somewhat experimental and untried.

Validating whether the process works can be accurately described as a ‘test’.  The result is usually a pass or fail outcome, as it either works or it doesn’t.  And I stress that tests are performed under ideal (or at least consistent) circumstances, because test results in a controlled environment should always be repeatable.

Exercises

Another activity that businesses should undertake, though few actually do, is the exercise.  As an analogy, consider the body builder.  A body builder knows and can successfully perform his routines with proper form.  But simply going through the motions is not what gives the body builder his size or strength.  To grow and improve, the body builder must push his body to its limits by constantly increasing the difficulty or intensity of his program.  Frequently, he ‘lifts to failure’, meaning he lifts very heavy weight enough times in a single set that he just cannot lift any more.

The same concept applies to disaster recovery planning.  Once the recovery process is tested and proven to work under ideal circumstances, organizations must increase the intensity of their program to keep it strong and continuing to grow stronger.  Increasing intensity involves introducing variables into an exercise scenario that requires participants to think a bit outside the plan, executing recovery under other-than-ideal circumstances.  By making each exercise more demanding than the last and exercising ‘to failure’, the organization grows more resilient in the face of a broader range of disaster sources and scales of business disruptions.

Practice

The last activity I want to address that occurs most frequently and is incorrectly called a ‘test’ is practice.  To use another sports analogy, imagine a little league baseball player.  At some point in his short baseball career he was given training in the basic mechanics of how to swing the bat to hit the ball.  Through trial and error and ‘testing’ various grips and postures he learned the most effective way to do so.  Later, to improve and expand his abilities, he ‘exercised’ his batting technique by introducing variation in pitches and learned how to hit an in-field grounder versus a pop-fly. And while there is a very fuzzy line between training, testing and exercise, the player does not neglect going back and practicing the fundamentals of simply hitting the ball.

In disaster recovery, just as in baseball, to repeat the same process over and over to get better and more comfortable with it is ‘practice’. Practice should nearly always result in successful execution, but can perhaps be graded on a scale of success.  In my experience, due to the demand for successful test execution, organizations often conduct ‘practice’, call it a test and present those successful ‘test’ results to management and stakeholders.  However, if an organization is only practicing execution of their plans, and they are nearly always successful in doing so, that organization is sure to have developed a false sense of security in their apparent ability to recover while  not prepared to manage through the variables that will inevitably occur during a real incident.

Conclusion

A business continuity / disaster recovery test and exercise program must consist of all three of these components.  Further, objectives for each type will be different and must be defined within the overall program.

The objective of a ‘test’ is to validate that the basic, fundamental process actually works under ideal circumstances.  The test fails if the process does not work and a new process should be developed.

The objective of ‘practice’ is continuous improvement.  Practice should always result in successful execution, though it could be along a spectrum of success based on how a particular organization measures it.  For example, recovering faster (closer to meeting RTO’s) may indicate a higher level of success. Failure during practice would indicate something significant was missed during testing and require revisiting the recovery process.

The objective of an ‘exercise’ is to evaluate the limits of the recovery process and the people involved.  In an exercise, people and processes are pushed to failure.  Not successfully executing during an exercise does not necessarily imply failure, and should in fact be anticipated.   An exercise as a whole, even if recovery failed, can be successful if information is obtained, lessons are learned and corrective actions are taken to improve performance next time.

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Disagree or have something to add?  Comments are certainly welcome!

About the Author: Chad M. Goode is problem-solver with a passion for and special expertise in helping businesses protect assets, control costs and meet their financial objectives through business continuity management, disaster recovery planning and IT strategy. Disaster Recovery: Tests vs Exercises vs Practice was sourced from the RSS feed at ChadGoode.com.

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