What Price 'Safe'?
When it comes to disaster recovery and business continuity, is there such a thing as too much technology?
I am biased, of course, but I enjoyed
this summer’s Campus Technology
2006 in Boston almost more than I
can say. Reason number one: the
opportunity it gave me for face time
with many of the technology visionaries
we cover during the editorial year. Reason
number two: the opportunity to
experience no end of live panel discussions
on topics of particular interest to
me. One such dialogue was that which
took place on August 2, when former
Tulane University (LA) CIO John Lawson
and Louisiana State University
CIO Brian Voss came together for the
afternoon’s General Session, “In Case
of Disaster, Break Glass: Reacting to
Extreme Change,” moderated by Middle
Tennessee State CIO Lucinda
Lea. (To see and hear their discussion,
go here.)
What was so interesting to me—and
I assume to many of the three hundred
or so session attendees—was the fact
that the panelists did not focus on the
drill-down of their tactical responses to
the Katrina disaster, but on more philosophical
issues.
They reminded their audience that
people and priorities are more important
than securing the best and newest technology
to deliver ourselves from the possibility
of evil. They even ran the oftreplayed
footage of a despondent Katrina
victim who had lost his wife (“everything
I had”) in the rising waters, just to
highlight the fact that no technology
could have prevented much of the disaster,
or ameliorated it. It was people,
they reminded us, who rose above all
else and often delivered the impossible
in the face of personal crisis. Although
technology can help—and, certainly,
improving systems we now understand
need improving is prudent—in the face
of calamity, it is people, they insisted,
who ultimately make the difference.
Moreover, they added, no level of hitech
preparedness can ever be guaranteed
to be enough, or to be precisely the
right kind of technological preparation
for any given disaster. How easy it would
be to assuage our fear of future catastrophe
by constructing a fortress of
systems and tools! But that would not
only be no assurance of safety, the panelists
pointed out, it would represent a
conscious decision to move dollars
(always a finite commodity in institutions
of higher education) away from the provision
of learning—and the mandate to
educate our students is the reason that
institutions of higher learning exist.
So, how much of a technological
buildup is too much? And what are the
people and process issues that must
be weighed in the balance? Surely
these are the true considerations of a
CIO worth his or her salt; considerations
that senior technologists must
weigh each and every day as they face
new challenges. We’ll have another
chance to examine the demands campus
technologists face—and their
unique approaches to these challenges—
in our upcoming “101 Best
Practices: Smart Classroom, Connectivity,
Administrative IT.” Send a
brief (200 words or less) description of
your own best practices in any of these
three areas to [email protected], with the subject line “Best Practices.”
The deadline is September 30. We
want to know how your own institution
is balancing the intelligent use of people,
process, and tools.
—Katherine Grayson, Editor-In-Chief
What have you seen and heard? Send to: [email protected].