I wrote a lengthy bit about communications as a key to surviving an IT disaster, which in many ways was a written version of the session I delivered at the MacIT conference at Macworld Expo last month. I tackle the stereotype of geeks as poor communicators, and lay out a strategy for getting IT departments into the communication habit. The stunning revelation that lead me down this road is a conclusion I came to when discussing an outage with a “layperson”… that is a user of technology rather than a maintainer of it. To him awareness was more important than downtime. Downtime didn’t bother him so much, so long as he was kept informed of what was going on, why, and when things would be back up. Forewarning would be even better. His downtime came about during a datacenter migration. A light bulb went off over my head, as I had successfully pulled off more than one datacenter migration within the past few years. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not, but the difference was that I put a huge emphasis on communication with our customers way before, before, during, and after the moves. I’m not some IT genius by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not the first to use this tool effectively. It just seems that most IT professionals forget this critical part of their management strategy.
Anyway, for the terminally curious, the series is linked below. My editor wisely split it into two parts.
For those of us who attended the actual conference session, is there a way of getting a PDF of the manual?
If you recall, that session was really a panel discussion rather than a straight presentation. Plus we delivered it “a capella”, that is, without any “slides”….
It was refreshing to actually see the audience’s faces instead of their left ears.
Thank you, by the way, for starting the Q&A rolling! 😉
Heh, no problem. But John came prepared with a thick book. I got a copy, but I don’t really want to type the thing out by hand. He said he had it in PDF – would prefer to get a copy that way. (And can pass it on to Bill Wiecking too.)
You mean the 2-day session? Or the 90 minute one, John has posted the manual for the 2-day networking session on his site. I have no materials for my short session though.
Thanks, I’ll check for it there.
here’s the link.