Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses

Chapter 3. Preparing Your IT Strategy

Your information technology (IT) strategy is critical to your disaster preparedness and recovery efforts. Most businesses have an in-house IT staff or a relationship with an external consultant that built their systems. Such relationships are valuable and it is not in the interest of a small business to abandon them in frustration. The IT team that built your system knows it in detail and has made decisions based on the specifications that your business had required. They may have been instructed to implement a certain feature "exactly this way." Should you terminate this relationship in haste and replace your existing team with a new IT solutions provider, you will incur additional costs and will likely once again be disappointed with the results.

Remember the expression from the movie Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here is a failure to communicate." It can be very frustrating for IT professionals to try to implement a systems solution at the direction of business people who don't understand the technical constraints or the inherent contradictions or unreasonableness in what they are asking. At the same time, it is very disappointing for business people to invest significant sums of capital in IT capacity only to find that the result is not what they had anticipated. In such situations, what you need to do is to make sensible and powerful changes that will be welcomed as improvements without embarrassing or blaming the existing IT members for ...