Clutter

Friday morning and it’s time to spring clean the home office.  The thrill of finding a manual to phone that I sent back R Orange two years ago is like that of junking an odd sock not worn for just as long.  Into the paper recycling bin it is tossed, to be reborn as another never to be read manual.   De-cluttering is a joy.  My wife thinks it clears the mind and opens one up to new opportunity.  If I am be able to reach my desk contorting my body navigating piles of paper, that usually suffices for me.  But when I steel myself for the annual clutter purge, the reward is oddly satisfying.
A friend of mine has de-cluttered his life to an extreme. When I used to visit his house, his dining room had become a storage area, such was the extent of his clutter.  Boxes of what not and CD’s were everywhere, during a messy divorce.  He now lives on a small boat. There is no room for clutter.  He showers and does the necessary in the marina’s facility.  All his bills are centralized.  With good heating, excellent broadband, nearby shopping and several lovely cars, it is not quite a spartan life, but the degree to which he has de-cluttered is remarkable.  Importantly, he is now much happier.
The same, I believe, can be applied to organizations.  They can de-clutter their customer relationships, getting rid of high cost to service, low growth potential accounts. At Lotus we had one highly diversified, large multinational customer who was demanding to the extreme. Every year they acquired scores of businesses and divested just as many. Though the revenue they provided was attractive, they took up an inordinate share of management and back office attention. Just for that client, processes had to be customized. Several times it crossed my mind that we should abandon the customer to Microsoft and focus on more profitable accounts.  In the end Microsoft did acquire the customer, and I would bet they eventually rued that win.  Now with the lion’s share of the enterprising messaging market -as well as the desktop and OS – markets , Microsoft has much greater leverage over that account, but I can’t believe the customer has lost its belligerence towards suppliers.  Google, if you recognize the account, you might want to say thanks but no thanks.  You don’t need customers that clutter.

Are we boring you?

One can never be sure what ball Life’s bowler is going to direct our way.

In 1971, the well known, erudite and gentile American talk show host, Dick Cavett, had on his show the 72 year old Jeremy Rodale one of the earliest advocates of organic farming.  He believed, as many now do, that healthy organic foods and natural remedies were the keys to longevity.  During his interview, Rodale said, “I’m in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way,” ”I’ve decided to live to be a hundred,” and  ”I never felt better in my life!”

Whilst interviewing another guest, the New York Post columnist Pete Hamill, Rodale made a snoring noise.  Hamill leaned over to Cavett and said, “This looks bad.” Though he later disputed it, Cavett was reputed to have said, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?”  Rodale had just died of a massive heart attack.  The show was never broadcast.

The shift in Work Area Recovery

Last month in advance of a seminar on Work Area Recovery for the BCI London Forum, I conducted a survey of London area Business Continuity Institute members.  The seminar was a sell out.  It seems that a lot of companies are re-evaluating their strategy for coping with denial of access to their building (usually through fire or flood) or some other melt down that requires staff to work in alternate locations. Companies like SunGard, ICM and IBM must be seeing a decline in traditional outsourced work area recovery where those companies’ sites are kept on standby for customers in the event of ….

Two factors seem to lie at the root of that decline.

• Much closer scrutiny of costs in the past two years caused all budgets to be reviewed for value for money.
• The increase in home working and hot desking have obviated the need for traditional office environments.

The biggest concern in the survey regarding home working was network load – network traffic at the last mile and in the server room.  I can’t help but think that capacity will rise as demand increases to a point where, if disaster strikes, provided it doesn’t affect everyone (in which case, our problems are bigger than our businesses) and provided the company has mirrored IT, there will be sufficient bandwidth at both ends to cope with spikes.

Black Swans over Europe

In all my conversations with business continuity professionals in London, I don’t recall anyone, ever mentioning the risk to supply chains or personnel posed by Icelandic volcanoes. What we just experienced was a classic Black Swan - something unheard of in this part of the world, something so far off the radar, it didn’t appear on a European’s risk register outside Iceland.  We had a relatively rare event – a steam-laden eruption coinciding with just the right weather conditions to allow an ash cloud to hang over Europe for several days – combined with a zero tolerance for ash+aviation, through lack of data.

On June 24,  1982 British Airways Flight 9  en route to Perth, flew through the ash cloud of Mount Galunggung, Indonesia losing all four engines for 13 minutes before managing to restart one, then all four, then losing one again, before landing in Jakarta with a badly damaged plane, abraded leading edge surfaces and obscured windscreen.  On July 13, another 747, a Singapore airlines plane, was forced to shut down 3 engines in the same area.   Since then authorties have developed strict guidelines, that we find in retrospect were (hopefully) too harsh. We didn’t know what the safe levels of ash were and now that we have much more data gathered over the past week, the aviation authorities have come up with a level that they feel represents a safe threshold. 

But weather patterns are fickle, and volcanoes are even more so.   Eyjafjallajökull is a mere pup compared to its next door neighbour, Katla.  The last three times Eyjafjallajökull erupted, Katla also erupted shortly after. Iceland’s President Olafur Grimsson this week referred to the recent event as a small rehearsal for what will happen when Katla comes alive.  Suddenly risk managers and business continuity professionals have something new to consider – or rather something very old, but overdue.  The past six days has also demonstrated that unless we have a balanced, reasonable approach to risk, we endanger the mechanisms of our society and commerce through excess caution.