AAAGGHHH, MY DATA CENTER!

While we’re waiting for Chandler to make his post on talking to the business, I’ll relate a story today for you about an experience I’ve had. I was working as an independent consultant, and my partner and I had been asked to perform a Business Impact Analysis for a financial institution. Now this financial institution was one of the top 5 in the nation for their particular industry, and as such - filled at the top with smart folks who had been doing their job very well for years.

Now this F.I. had been, um, "asked" by the government to update their BCP. As part of this effort, they asked us to come in and help them with the BIA. For project kickoff we were asked to do the obligatory "What Is A BIA, and What We’re Asking Your People To Do" presentation for the C-levels and the 22 SVP types who were BU heads. The problem being that if they were going to spend all this money on the DR process, they wanted all the key stakeholders to be committed to the success of the engagement. This of course, is almost never the case. Sales is there to make sales. Support for support. Even IT can be resistant to undertake the effort required for a good BIA/BCP. So this was the "buy-in" presentation.

If there was a theme to our slides (besides the brief RPO/RTO definitions and examples) it was, "Well, the government is making you do this for compliance, but there really might actually be other benefits, too!" If you’ve had to do one of these kickoff meetings where the gov’t has mandated the work plan, you know what I mean. So we whipped through the slides, had nice animations and examples for RTO and RPO and some benefit statements. (At one point the CEO chimed in, "Excellent, when y’all are through with this, I’ll know what everybody in the organization does!") Something interesting happened when we got to the Q & A part of the presentation.

If you’ve ever done just a BIA effort, you know that it’s difficult to have folks focus solely on the BIA and not moving immediately into the DR planning bit. You continually have to herd folks back into thinking about just their discrete processes. This particular Q & A session was no different. Department heads went to the obligatory Katrina references, and earthquakes and other macabre "the building is no longer here" scenarios. Like watching dominoes fall, each SVP wanted to talk about some DR scenario that hadn’t been mentioned yet… "But what about the bird-flu/major ice storm/hazardous chemical spill on the access road?"

When I went to stop this line of thinking and remind them that they needed to focus on processes for BIA, I said:

What we’re ultimately talking about here is risk. And risk is a probability function - probability of loss event and probable dollar losses. You need to not focus on the worst-case scenario, because those are low probability events. It’s much more likely that an IT glitch takes down the phones, the mainframe, or a discrete system - and the BIA must account for these higher probability but less drastic events, too.

Now when I said "risk" and "probability" about 2/3 of the heads in the room nodded enthusiastically. Finally someone had stopped talking to them in terms of "made for TV movies" and FUD, but had put a rational perspective on what had been an otherwise emotional discussion. Their nodding indicated to me that they appreciated that. It was one of those times when what you say obviously changes the course of the conversation.

And you know what? I think that statement by itself won more converts who "bought into" the BIA process than any compliance or FUD or even imagined potential benefit bullet. In our training and interviews, the managers themselves would repeat that statement when their people started to focus on Godzilla-smashing-the-data-center-building-underneath-his-gigantic-reptillian-feet scenarios.

So the next time you’re losing your audience, or being questioned about relevancy - try the risk angle. It might just be the language you’re looking for.

Posted on February 28