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CIOs and Swine Flu: What to Do
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This is not the first time we’ve had to deal with a potentially pandemic virus. Remember SARs in 2003? The outbreak of bird flu three years later? This time around, however, we’re technically better equipped to mitigate its impact on business and governmental operations. In fact, there are a number of steps IT chiefs, using these tools, can take right now to prepare for even the worst case scenario – a full blown outbreak of Swine Flu.
For starters, review your company’s business contingency plans, particularly in regard to absenteeism rates, which research firm Gartner estimates could run 40 percent or more. Another consultant projects a worst case scenarios in which all workers would telecommute for the duration of a severe outbreak.
Some companies are already prepared to operate under these conditions. London-based risk management company Business Forums International’s (BFI) program manager Elizabeth Smith told Associated Press that many businesses were better prepared since the bird flu scare in early 2006 put pandemic risks higher on their agenda. As an example, BFI has held 20 conferences in the past three years involving some 10,000 businesses across Europe, albeit focused on fears of a bird flu, rather than swine flu, outbreak.
Of course, three years ago, wireless, satellite data for employees outside wireless broadband coverage and collaborative Internet-based tools such as web-casting weren’t readily available. And today even social networking tools such as Tweeter can be useful. As of April 27, some 15,000 people were receiving tweets from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta updating them on Swine Flu developments.
To take advantage of these tools, however, preliminary planning and testing are a must. Among the necessary steps:
•Take a through inventory of the technology and communications tools that are available to your organization’s employees. Do employees have wireless laptops or desktops at home; cell phones and/or landlines (do you have all the numbers), Blackberries, iPods?
•Once you’ve taken stock, you have to determine which employees are not equipped to operate from home, and what you need to provide quickly and as inexpensively as possible for them to do so. As an example, Gartner notes that in locations where the local telco has yet to install DSL, employees may need HSPA adapters with built-in WiFi. It recommends you purchase some laptop HSPA adapters as part of your contingency plan. It also recommends spreading out purchases across several networks, because if there is pandemic epidemic some networks may become overloaded.
•You need to develop part of your Website, or create an internal helpdesk to enable employees to obtain company updates and present questions such that may involve everything from marketing and payroll to supply chain management and IT. Obviously, this is not solely an IT responsibility. HR, finance and purchasing may need to be involved
•You need to test the systems used by staff for telecomm communiting as quickly as possible. This is mandatory. IT managers should plan, test and add capacity to ensure the sustainability of what is likely to be a predominantly work-at-home environment.
•Check on your vendors including outsourcers to see how you services might be impacted by the outbreak. Several major outsourcers operate out of Mexico, which, of course, has been hardest hit by the Swine epidemic.
•Finally, Gartner cautions, Enterprises, governments and regulatory agencies should not make panic-driven moves — for example, closing down operations — in response to possibly overblown media reports. But business continuity management (BCM) and disaster recovery (DR) professionals and other stakeholders should use the widespread concern over the swine flu to increase enterprise awareness of the potential business impact of a widespread outbreak of disease.
Comments (3)
1. 04-29-2009 21:03
A couple of points:
First, all planning should be done with the realization that an influenza pandemic (which seems quite probable now that WHO has raised their threat level from 4 to 5) may be an extended event. What we are now experiencing is "only" the first wave of influenza; pandemics usually occur in multiple waves, and - bad news - the second wave is typically more dangerous than the first wave. A pandemic may not run it's full course for a full 18 months from the start.
Second: rather than implementing telecommuting for "all" employees, a better approach is to classify employees in categories, attempting to isolate those who perform critical tasks that lend themselves to remote work. It's a much more efficient use of resources compared to an "everyone in the pool" approach.
Third (something of a nit pick): the "avian flu scare of 2006" isn't over. That flu strain (avian flu type A/H5N1) is still alive and well in several parts of the world, and is still capable of mutating to a form that is easily transmitted to/by humans.
Along the same lines, by the way, it should be noted that the current "swine" flu has some DNA characteristics that show it has "bird" flu ancestors. It turns out that swine are a good "human analog" and do pretty well as at picking up avian flus and serving as an unwitting host while the virus mutates into human-contractable forms.
Net: the smart move is to fully understand what's happening, and what the full implications of an influenza pandemic are. Don't rely on 30-second sound bites and highly summarized articles: do your homework and prepare accordingly - else be caught "unawares" when the worst case plays out.
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2. 04-30-2009 18:49
It may sound rather drastic, but companies should begin by encouraging/imploring their employees to not travel to Mexico. A friend told me this week he was taking his family to Mexico to take advantage of the deals. When he returns his kids will be exposing their schools to possible contamination and he, in turn, will be exposing his office workers. It's very tough on Mexico, yes, but people need to take this seriously. The sooner it can be contained, the better for everyone.
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3. 05-03-2009 21:21
In years gone by BEFORE all the connectivity options BCM used options like change freezes and other IT environment stabilization techniques to allow IT to function without human intervention. While this helped widespread business operations, it did little for the smaller one building business. For those, there were things like standard orders and amassing extra inventory to overcome the lack of production capacity.
In recent years I've likened American business to that of a very lean super athlete. Unfortuntely, a super athlete with little body fat has very little hope of surviving lean times with no food while businesses with a little fat will be in a better position to survive.
Circumstances like these show how ineffective it is to have just enough people to get the job done.
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