Christmas greetings

The Lizard would like to extend warm Christmas greetings to all Crisis Lounge regulars. Have a great holiday and a great new year.

Near misses and direct hits

The Lizard's alter ego Jim Preen has just had an article published on Continuity Central. Here's a taster:

The argument goes like this. Business continuity is not about the little disturbances and the day-to-day interruptions. That’s incident management; and not to be confused with a major incident that knocks out all your IT or leaves your HQ a smouldering wreck. Incident management is a different beast from business continuity management and requires different processes and resources.

Sure, you can argue about where the line is drawn between incident management and business continuity, but they are different disciplines and not to be confused.

But is this a correct or, even, a useful distinction?

Let’s look at IT for a moment. Systems are often brought down by a series of small disasters that can create more frequent downtime than a really big catastrophe. If you have a number of small-scale outages you may irritate staff and clients as much as if you’d undergone a full-scale incident.

Smaller disasters are often handled ad hoc and if the problem is easily overcome people assume that planning isn’t necessary. Conversely if the issue isn’t quickly resolved the blame game starts and staff complain that plans and training are inadequate.

But there’s more to it than that.

Read more here.

Singapore Sling

Crisis Solutions staff are packing their cases for a trip to Singapore this coming week. The team is delivering crisis management training to a whole host of people at a world-renowned bank, but who knows they may find time for a Gin Sling or two at the Raffles Hotel.

Asia seems to be beckoning quite frequently these days. Watch this space for pictures and updates.

'Unthinkable'

The Lizard is currently reading the fascinating book ‘Unthinkable’ by Amanda Ripley. For a book that takes a cold hard look at crises and disaster it’s surprisingly readable and a real page-turner.

She uses an abundance of interlinked case studies that look at how people respond in a crisis and has some practical advise on how to live to tell the tale. The one big takeaway is that people who have had some form of crisis training have a far greater chance of survival.

There are also some extraordinary stories of heroism that make this a far from depressing book, but it is perhaps the totally counterintuitive ways in which people respond to a catastrophe that linger in the mind. The Lizard gives it 5 stars.

My Blackberry’s on the blink

Tim Flynn feels your pain

Communications
It’s been a torrid few days for Blackberry and their customers who rightly expect their gadgets to get information (SMS, BBM) from their handset to the recipient on time, every time. As with any advances in technology, once you show people what can be achieved that’s the standard they come to expect.

Blackberry have been very poor in communicating with customers which suggest that they just don’t get the importance their products play in people's lives. They haven’t grasped the information needs of their key stakeholders.

In doing so Research in Motion, the company behind Blackberry, have created a very effective information gap down which they have plummeted. All of which creates the very real prospect of corporate customers not renewing contracts and going shopping elsewhere. Scary for any company especially when there are a myriad of similar devices on the market.

Operational Response

As far as their operational response goes it all seems too little too late. My suspicion is that their operation is so complex and the list of potential faults so huge that is it has not been easy for them to diagnose the extent of their problems or how long it would take to fix them.

Complexity

The complexity of their operation is certainly a factor here. If you look at any number of recent crises such as the current debt crisis or the banking crisis of 2007/8, a great deal of it was built on people's inability to understand the big picture. Complexity seems like a good idea during the good times but makes fixing the bad times pretty tricky.

Tim Flynn is a senior consultant at Crisis Solutions

Is bird flu making a comeback?

Sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for. The Lizard’s alter ego Jim Preen wrote an article recently on what makes for a convincing scenario during a crisis simulation.

He had this to say:

So what is my favourite scenario? As with all things scenarios seem to be at the whim of fashion or at least what’s been in the news recently. How long before we start devising an exercise based on widespread rioting and looting?

Some years it’s terror attacks, then the smart money is on damage to data centres, but for me, I miss the ‘good old days’ of pandemic flu. That often seemed the perfect scenario because it was and is potentially catastrophic (how we love a good catastrophe!), could affect any organization, but also allowed for planning, being a rising tide event.

It involves human beings rather than technology, which can be a turn-off to those not technically minded and given the medical evidence also highly credible. No doubt it will stage a comeback in a year or two.

Well bird flu seems to be making a comeback rather sooner than expected. Time is currently running an article headlined:

It’s back: Bird flu returns and this time it’s mutated

During the last couple of flu seasons, we were all worried about H1N1, a new and virulent strain of influenza, but this winter we may have to contend with a much deadlier foe: H5N1 or bird flu. Some Asian countries are reporting this week the first cases of a mutant strain of the virus spreading in poultry.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported on Monday that the H5N1 virus has mutated, something that public health officials had feared would happen and that could possibly make the virus more dangerous to people.

In its original form, H5N1 primarily infects wild birds and poultry, including geese, chickens, ducks and turkeys, but only rarely jumps into people. Still, the fact that some people have become infected with H5N1 by eating improperly prepared and contaminated poultry — the virus has killed 331 people and infected 565 since it first appeared in 2003 — led experts to warn that it was only a matter of time before it altered into a form that made it easier to spread to humans.

Read more here

Who's Sari now?

More pictures from the Crisis Solutions Indian Adventure

























Do I eat it or smoke it?