[SPAM] Re: Disaster Recovery Procedures

[Ned Bedinger]

Lou Quillio wrote:
> Lyse Tremblay wrote:
>   
>> because these [DR procedures] are internal to IT and most 
>> probably will not be published externally.
>>     
>
> IMO, those are famous last words.  If your [client?] firm bids on or
> wins a government contract, forms a joint venture, merges, is sold
> ... somebody will ask, "Can we have those those IT disaster recovery
> procedures?"  Then you're scrambling.
>   

Good eye!  And so true.  One of the great impetuses for formally 
documenting processes is that the company is in negotiations for 
something like Lou has mentioned. 

An example from my fascinating case-study files:  At a Baby Bell 
wireless phone division, management decided that the business wasn't 
profitable and went looking for a buyer.  One of the wireless giants 
became interested, but as a condition of purchase required that all 
essential business functions be updated, meet their standards, fully 
documented, etc.   Baby Bell ended up having to re-engineer the legacy 
billing system--the buyer wanted nothing to do with Baby Bell's existing 
lash-up of undocumented COBOL and expensive big iron.  The documentation 
for the new system was specified by the purchaser, and obviously 
included a full Disaster Recovery plan for the new billing system.

As techwriter, a disaster recovery plan seemed like a big stand-alone 
project.  I didn't know about the really big enchilada that was going 
down in the boardroom, but once revealed it made writing Baby Bell's DR 
plan seem roughly equivalent to Baby getting a shoe shine after buying a 
whole new wardrobe. 

My two summer solstice bits,

Ned Bedinger
doc at edwordsmith.com