Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Resiliency

“Court disaster long enough and it will accept your proposal.”  Mason Cooley

Independent Software Vendors (ISV's) like any organization must engage in the activities of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) also called Business Continuity and Resiliency Planning (BCRP). This is especially critical for ISV's that provide Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to their customers. The process identifies exposure to internal and external threats that can disrupt or worse interrupt the operations that are the lifeblood of the business.  Once these risks are identified a recovery plan is developed to return the business back to full operations. Once a recovery plan is in place the business can evaluate, with the knowledge of the risks identified, what hard and soft assets can be applied to prevent a disruption from occurring in the first place, improving resiliency of the business.

Some objectives for the BCRP we listed in our last planning cycle:

• Identify risks, critical production components and the impacts of their failure.
• Establish systems to monitor the health of these critical production components.
• Document recovery procedures to restore critical production components in the event of failure in a time frame that does not breach the customer End User License Agreement (EULA) or Service Level Agreement (SLA). - These recovery procedures also assist in avoiding confusion experienced during an outage.
• Identify personnel that must be notified in the event of an outage.
• Create a plan to communicate with key people during the recovery and an escalation procedure.
• Establish a testing procedure to validate the recovery plans.
• Establish a process in which the plan can be maintained, updated and tested periodically.
• Serve as a guide for the IT or Network Services Team.

The BCRP process should be considered cyclical, something that should be executed at least once a year. The BCRP Cycle is composed of 3 main phases (the 3 R's),  Risk Analysis, Recovery or Solution Design and Resiliency or Maintenance. At a more detailed level we can define the BCRP Cycle using the diagram below.

Risk analysis
This phase should identify exposure to internal and external threats that can disrupt or worse interrupt the operations of the company. Establishing 'Severity Levels' is useful in this phase.  For example:

• Level 1 Disaster Recovery - Severe Outage
  This level is assigned to those risk scenarios where the disruptions are as the name implies disastrous and affect the availability of any component that interrupts operations completely and cannot be fixed at the production site and operations have to be moved to a new location. These disruptions by definition cannot be resolved at the Production Site and will result in instant escalation (chain of notification and approval) o move the Production Site to the Disaster Recovery site, a significant declaration.  Think of a meteorite hitting your data center, or as actually happened this year at a local data center here in DC, a back hoe cutting your data centers internet trunk. Here the potential for EULA/SLA breach is high depending on the fail over time to the new site.
• Level 2 Operational Recovery - Outage
  This level is assigned to those risk scenarios where the disruptions affect the availability of any component that interrupts operations completely but can be fixed at the Production Site. Rhe recovery plan for these risk scenarios should be well within the time that might lead to a breach of  any customer EULA/SLA.  There will be an escalation procedure in place that will move a Level 2 risk to a Level 1 risk should recovery take longer than expected.
• Level 3 Offline Recovery - Redundant Outage
  This level is assigned to those risk scenarios where the disruption has no effect on operations, i.e. a pooled web server goes down and the load balancer automatically takes it out of circulation.  The minimal impact of these outages are usually due to built in resiliency, never the less the outage must be addressed to bring the system back to complete health.

Recovery / Solution Design
First it's important to define the two types of recovery planning that were outlined in the Severity Level definitions above:

• Disaster Recovery
  The process of establishing procedures to recover operations in a location other than the primary production facility after a declaration of disaster.
• Operational Recovery
  The process of establishing procedures to recover production in the same location and does not require a declaration of disaster.

This phase should produce procedures and identify soft and hard assets to recover from the disruption and bring the business back to full execution after a disruption in both the Disaster and Operation Recovery scenarios.

It is also important to define 2 important numbers which in the end will have a significant impact on the solution design:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - the acceptable latency of data that will not be recovered (usually driven by transaction volume and speed).
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - the acceptable amount of time to restore operations (usually driven by EULA/SLA financial impact).

Implementation
This phase should establish the necessary monitors, documentation, communication protocols, testing and fail over environments to successfully execute and test the Recovery / Solution Design.  Disaster Recovery will require a fail over operations site be put in place at a different location, this site might be a good candidate to conduct testing and validation of the Recovery / Solution Design rather than jeopardize production.

Testing and Validation
This phase should execute the Recovery / Solution Design through forced disruptions (on the fail over or test platform) which if successful will validate the recovery plans and provide metrics for impact on customer EULA/SLA.  Part of the validation process is to benchmark your Disaster recovery fail over site to make sure it's performance and through put are acceptable, remember your recovering for all your customers, not just a select few.

Maintenance and Resiliency
This phase is a post mortem, what did you learn from the Testing and Validation Phase, what parts in the Recovery & Solution Design had to be modified because they didn't work, this information should update the BCP.  It's also useful here since you have become so educated on your operations, and risks that can impact your operations is to use this knowledge to identify production components that may be candidates for resiliency improvements.  Where these improvements include capital expenses these should be included in the next budgeting cycle using your BCP to make the business case for the expenditure.

Good Luck!

The ClueTrain Manifesto

"We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal. " Theses #85 Clue Train Manifesto

I read the Clue Train Manifesto some time ago, but recently re-read it and found some interesting insights into Web 2.0 in the book.

The Clue Train Manifesto was written by marketing specialists Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles and David Weinberger and first posted online in April of 1999 and then published as a book in January of 2001. It proclaimed the coming of the internet and the end of business as usual. Their premise laid out 95 theses that proclaimed markets are conversations, conversations among people, conversations that can't be controlled by business, conversations that change the old mass marketing strategy of control and replace it with the new Web marketing strategy of influence.

The Web has enabled these conversations to happen in ways simply not possible in the era of mass media. The Internet makes it possible for everyone to participate in the "great converation". For business the opportunity is fostering, learning from and understanding these conversations than slicing and dicing these conversations to drive business growth.

The ClueTrain Manifesto states:

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. "

The ClueTrain Manifesto goes on to warn the business owners unwilling to change.

"You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation. "

As Jacob Nielsen puts it a little more drastically:

"The ClueTrain Manifesto lists 95 reasons Internet business is different from traditional business. Much overlap with my own comments on Web design over the last five years. Despite the fact that this manifesto and my own writings are online for everybody to read, I predict that most big companies will still not get it because their internal management structures are too well built and capable of resisting customer-centricity until it's too late. 80% of the Fortune-500 companies will be gone in ten years (unfortunately I don't know which will be the 100 companies to change in time)." useit.com: Spotlight link March 27, 1999 — Jakob Nielsen

The ClueTrain Manifesto was certainly an insight into the phenomenon of Web 2.0. Although Web 2.0 is hard to define let's look at some of the definitions and how closely they resemble the principles of the ClueTrain Manifesto.

According to Tim O'Reilly,
"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

An IBM social networking analyst, Dario de Judicibus, has proposed a different definition which is more focused on social interactions and architectural implementation:
"Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generate content that is published, managed and used through network applications in a service-TR

So what we have learned is that if you own a business you have to understand that Web 2.0 is about conversations. These conversations can be about your company, about your employees, about your products or about your products in a blender. Web 2.0 is about product and service offerings that foster conversations. FaceBook (this is who I am), YouTube (video communication) , LinkedIn (this is my network) all of these Web 2.0 phenomenon foster conversations. Microsoft has come great sites that foster conversation for their developer community at Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/ and home user community at Channel 10 http://www.on10.net/Default.aspx, I think the Channels go up to 11, where you can find a remake of Spinal Tap.

If you are an existing business than your challenge is making your current products available for conversations or creating new products that will foster conversations. A favorite example of a successful company that has made the transition to Web 2.0 is the Motley Fool. The Motley Fool has a simple stated goal: to educate, amuse, and enrich their readers and help them make better financial decisions. Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, the privately-held multi-media company today has nearly 200 employees in the United States and UK and is a top provider of investment advice and financial information. Recognizing the early power of the Internet, the Gardners moved The Motley Fool online to AOL in 1994. Three years later The Motley Fool migrated to its own award-winning website, http://www.fool.com/. Today The Motley Fool reaches millions each month online through its own site and partnerships with such leading portals as Yahoo!, MSN and AOL.com.

The Motley Fool introduced a new feature on their site called CAPS targeted at the market conversations behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon. I believe CAPS stands for Capital Asset Pricing System.

Motley Fool CAPS operates from a simple premise: Working together, we can improve our investing results. This revolutionary new service pools the resources of the Motley Fool Community to help you identify the best stocks at the best times to buy them -- and which stocks to avoid, too!

I am a user on CAPS and it really has all the attributes of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

So how does CAPS work? (this taken from their site)

1. Players rate stocks.
At the heart of CAPS are thousands of predictions. Players predict whether stocks will outperform or underperform the S&P 500 and over what time frame this will happen.
The Fool compiles the data, showing all the picks you have made and all the picks for individual stocks.

2. The Fool Keeps the score.
As stocks change in value, they evaluate players' predictions. Players receive an accuracy percentage, indicating how often they make correct predictions and a score, which is the percentage by which their picks beat the S&P 500.

3. Players receive CAPS ratings.
Based on the performance of their picks, CAPS players receive a percentile rating (from 1 to 100). This rating indicates the percentage of people that player is outperforming. The higher the rating, the better!

4. Stocks receive CAPS ratings.
A stock's CAPS rating is the aggregation of every prediction for that stock. The rating indicates whether or not players think that stock will outperform the S&P 500.
Important concept to follow... pay attention!! Here it is:
Players with higher ratings have more influence on a stock's rating.
If you're a great investor with a great track record, than you are weighted heavier than others what you think is very important. So, your given more weight. However, if you don't know the difference between a stock and a parking ticket, your not going to affect the company rating very much.

5. CAPS gets smarter
Every CAPS rating is updated every five minutes. And with each additional prediction, CAPS recalculates and recompiles the data, constantly refining the community sentiment.
Over time, the best investors will naturally work their way to the top and will gain more influence over the stock ratings. Conversely, the less successful players will have less impact.
And then the cycle repeats. Players make more predictions, which affect their player ratings, which affect the stock ratings, and so on. The result is a service which will help you find better stocks and follow the best investors.

This is a great example of a company navigating the Web 2.0 world to introduce a new product offering. The Motley Fool has created and is fostering an ongoing conversation with CAPS. This is a conversation in which their customers are fully engaged and has legs to expand into many different areas.

Web 2.0 is also about access, access to your company and products to enable conversations. I'll talk about this in the next blog but some technology to check out before then MS Astoria and MS IM bots.

The Importance of Passion

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”
Friedrich Hebbel (German Poet and Dramatist, 1813-1863)

There is no greater motivator for the workplace than to create passion around people's work, that's when great things are accomplished. And the deepest passion comes about when people feel that the product or service they are working on helps the customer in some tangible way.

Out of college I worked for a software start-up that developed tax preparation software for both consumers and businesses. The founder and owner of the company was one of the greatest people I have ever met on many different levels, his name was Jim Petersen. One of his most important skills that contributed to the success of his company, was an ability to create passion around people's work.

We were all young, right out of college, all of us wanting to make a mark on the world but not knowing exactly where to start. We didn't mind working late into the night. We would to gauge the level of dedication using a metric called 'turn around time', this was the time it took you to go home, grab a quick bite to eat, shower, maybe grab a little nap and get back to work. It was grueling and motivation was the key to sustain the tempo.

Part of the passion for the work Jim generated was by sharing in the experience, just being there showed the staff that this was important to him, so important that although he couldn't make the product happen himself, he could be there to cheer people on and share in the experience. Jim would always be there checking up on the activities into the late night and early morning hours. Sometimes he would just sit in the hall and chat with people as they walked by. At other times he would walk in with a couple bags of snacks to refresh the snack table. At the beginning the snack table was always stocked with high sugar snacks and candies. As we began to put on weight and exhibit the other side effects of too much sugar there was a general revolt against the snack table offerings, I was chosen as the leader to inform Jim that we wanted, no demanded, health food to replace the sugar snacks. Needless to say he was surprised but more than willing to make the changes. At the end of the project we ended up at a happy equilibrium between apples, tea, and and nuts on the health food side, with M&M's, sodas and taffy to balance it out.

For the most part, Jim would generate passion through his pep talks, sometimes coming out in some strange segway in a meandering conversation. From Jim’s soap box a simple tax preparation program became something that would change thousands of peoples lives helping parents to send their kids to school with their tax refunds, a payroll program made it possible for people to pay their bills and feed their families, and a fixed assets application enabled companies to grow and create new jobs for the unemployed. Granted at times it was a stretch, it created a passion in everyone's work that was above and beyond the work at hand. For young people trying to make their mark and do something important, this was very powerful stuff. (to read more about Jim Petersen see my blog entry here).

There is an old saying, "When we are passionate about what we do our passion gets translated into creativity, into the amount of effort we devote to the business, and into many other factors big and small". Passion has a beneficial impact to our success and in the end the success of the businesses we work for. So if you want to be successful in your project or business find a way to create passion around the work you and your staff are doing.

“There is no greatness without a passion to be great, whether it's the aspiration of an athlete or an artist, a scientist, a parent, or a businessperson.”- Tony Robbins

Training Completes Effective Customer Support

“...to better train our customer base will drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and reduce long-term support costs.” James Hanley

Training is an important component of an effective online support offering.

1.Enhances Customer Support

• Educates the customer to answer their own questions before they open a ticket.(“How do I questions…”)
• Educates the customers with “just-in-time” training on changes and how these changes are implemented and can be used in the applications, avoiding calls.
• Educates customers on “what’s new” in the application at release time, avoiding calls.

2. Drives Customer Success

• Customer training enables buyers to effectively utilize BNA Software products. The better a customer understands how to use our products, the higher their level of success and overall satisfaction.
• Customer training increases customer retention, new training is a reason to stay in contact with customers, and a reason for customers to come back.

3. Increase Sales

• Customer training enables buyers to deeply understand how to use, apply, and customize products. As they better understand the details of the products, they identify new opportunities to buy more and they become advocates within their organizations.
• As new product features and models are announced, highly trained customers can more rapidly adopt them

4. Makes Money

• Customer training is a high-margin business itself. IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Lawson Software, and hundreds of other high-technology companies use their customer training businesses as a profit center. Education offerings are viewed as “products” – some are high value, high priced products; others are given away to enhance customer satisfaction. Every software company can and should promote a premium support offering

5. Reduce Costs

• Reduce Issue Management Costs – training drives down issue management transactions by educating the customer first before the call is made.
• Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs – training is a compelling offer to use in promotion campaigns