Posts tagged with linkedin

First, I admit that I haven’t used Google’s Buzz much. I have it linked to my Google Reader to share articles, but that’s it. On the other hand, I’ve been using Twitter quite a bit.

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?  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

The guys at Mashable have put together a collection of some incredible videos and photos from Nashville, TN depicting the damage caused by the flooding over the weekend.

Among an organization’s most important and valuable assets is its reputation. This applies equally to companies, departments and even project teams.Business continuity and disaster recovery planning is not just about mitigating loss and improving up-time, availability and maintaining customer service through an outage.  It’s not just about getting ‘back to normal’. It’s also not just about ‘learning from the experience’ to avoid the disaster or better-managing a similar event in the future.  Read More

That is the question… sort of an informal survey regarding business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Part 1. Choosing between your employees and your technology, which exposes your company to the greatest risk?

And by ‘risk’ I mean which, if managed poorly and failed, would result in the greatest loss, but, if managed and executed well, would result in the greatest increase in profit for your company?  Read More

Click here to read the entire thread on LinkedIn.

The following question was posted earlier today on LinkedIn:

how do you think this statement “I intends to have an IT business continuity plan that ensures 100% availability of organisational IT at all times”?

Continue reading to see my response (and please forgive my typo)  Read More

At first, 10-15 seconds doesn’t sound like much time. But if you’ve ever been through a significant tremor, you know that short window of warning is enough to do what you need to get to safety… and would be better than nothing.

Interesting read from Emergency Management: Earthquake Early Warning System Coming to California

I found some really spectacular live footage of the volcano eruption in Iceland that is wreaking havoc with flights across Europe.  The disruption to air service is not just an inconvenience for the airlines.  The impact extends to business travelers who need to meet clients and make sales, shipment of critically important parcels, emergency supplies and organs for transplant.  Read More

Years ago, in a conversation about ERP systems with the president of a Tier 1 automotive supplier, he said something that will forever stay with me.  We were talking about whether we (the company) should retire our legacy system in favor of SAP.  He said that if he really had his choice, we should develop our own solution in-house.  Puzzled, I pushed further and asked him what would drive him to reach such a conclusion with SAP, Oracle, our legacy product and a number of other industry-specific solutions available.  He responded that he doesn’t want to change the way he manages the business to make it fit with some off-the-shelf application according to how some software developer or any other company thinks his business should be managed.  Read More

If you have never put much thought into managing risk in your organization, a risk assessment is the place to start.  It can be an eye-opener for a number of reasons.  First, you’ll quickly see that no risk management methodology is going to allow your organization to avoid all potential loss.  Second, if you have never done an assessment before, you may be shocked to find just how many threats exist to your organization and how vulnerable you are.  Third, you may be equally surprised to find that there are likely several actions you can take in the near term, with little or no cash investment, to mitigate some of that downside risk.  Read More

While this can apply to a number of different scenarios, it’s especially appropriate to business continuity planning.  As business continuity professionals, we are often tasked with meeting certain goals and objectives.  Our success and the success of our programs depend on other people; people over whom we have no management authority.  Read More