Towering rebuild: what I learnt from 9/11

Keeping a site running is one thing. Another crucial planning step is making sure the IT staff is able to keep working. Wissmann estimates that on September 11, his developers lost six to eight weeks of work when workstations and the local development environment were destroyed. The loss would have been greater, but both Leibundgut and Wissmann used laptops as their primary computers, and both had taken them home the night of September 10. "It was sheer luck that Leibundgut and I had our laptops," says Wissman. "If we hadn't, we would have been pushed back half a year at least." The developers, though, lost "an incredible amount of personal business data on each machine." After the eleventh, Thermo purchased laptops for the entire staff, which allowed us to work remotely while new office space was found. Once in our new office, we were given backup space on a file server, the contents of which were automatically backed up to a remote location every night. This system has already proven its worth, when a number of machines were stolen from the office last February. Despite the theft, data loss was minimised. Larger offices may require formal arrangements for standby office space as part of their continuity planning. Wissmann doesn't see this as necessary for smaller offices like Thermo's eBusiness group. For one thing, in an emergency as widespread as the WTC disaster, there's a good chance that contingency space will also be unusable. Indeed, in the weeks following September 11, several companies reported that they couldn't get access to facilities. Telecommuting worked well for Thermo once we were properly equipped. We supplemented regular work at home with weekly meetings in space provided by sympathetic vendors. After protecting data and insuring the ability to work remotely, the third focus of Thermo's continuity planning review was to thoroughly document all systems, and put that documentation on the departmental Intranet (which, of course, was backed up off-site). This way, if a member of the development team were to be hit by a bus (or an airplane) their knowledge would not be lost with them. There are less morbid advantages too, according to Wissman: "If you want to be able to take a vacation without getting a cell phone call every day, make sure you're not so desperately needed -- document your work." If September 11th proved anything, it's that you can't plan for, or even imagine, every possibility. But now that Thermo has become much more vigilant about documenting work and backing up data, the company is much better prepared to work through a disaster. Some of the things that helped us get back to work after September 11 were the result of luck, and others of planning, but for the future, disaster planning is now a serious part of Thermo's business. Personally, the thing that helped us get back to work best, as individuals, was having any kind of plan to work with. In the haze of tragedy, when no one is thinking straight, it may be that having even the driest business exercise to cling to is better than nothing. As Rudy Giuliani and others pointed out in the days following September 11, maintaining the regular patterns of life to whatever degree possible is a positive and life-affirming step.

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