PC Reboot and Some thoughts

An exciting event happened today at work, all users’ PCs are starting to reboot and reboot in loop conditions. It reminded me of a virus few years back that forcing PC into reboot loop. Everyone was curious to find out the root cause of the problem. It took IT couple of hours to trace the problem back to antivirus definition file. However, my discussion point is not about PC reboot. There are two thoughts come out of this event, business continuity and the value of Information Technology that often asked in this class and from business units.

Organizations large and small are focusing on the business continuity practices since the unfortunate event of 911. However, most organizations are focusing on recovering IT infrastructure. While it is important to have a plan to recover IT infrastructure, organizations often miss a great opportunities on how to recover their business without IT. It was not that long ago, PCs were not at every employee’s desk and some or all employees worked on the telephone and used paper to process business transactions. Such manual process has lost since PCs took over the organization’s business activities. The assumptions of IT infrastructure availability is always there are bad for business in case of either natural disaster events or human errors like we had today. Those unpredictable events can stop business processes cold and dig a big hole for business to recover if the outages last more than just a few hours or even a few days. Business needs to have a manual process for the most critical business in order to survive in the most extreme events. Hacker penetrations are also a big concerns, not too long ago, Google’s network was compromised by hackers (according to a report by New York Times). The hackers could have done more damages other than stealing Google’s code, but who can guarantee knowledge stolen won’t be used in future attacks to disrupt or bring down the whole network.

The second thought is about the value of Information Technology bringing to the business. It is difficult to put a dollar sign on Information Technology, but today’s event does demonstrate the value of Information Technology. We can tell that without Information Technology there will be no business, just like employees. Without employees, there will be no businesses. It is true that business can go back to manual process as stated above, but the question is can you compete based on that kind of business model? I challenge anyone who said they can. Therefore, the value of Information Technology is embedded into business process. If you must put a dollar amount for Information Technology, ask yourself a question, how many more employees do I have to hire without the help of Information Technology? Can you compete without Information Technology? Do you know the answer?