Before Planning for Disaster Recovery

I posted before The Difference Between Backup and Disaster Recover, I will explain more about disaster recovery, and I hope these information will help you to build an accurate disaster recovery plan that meets your organization strategy and needs.

One of the most important steps for IT people is to create “Business Impact Analysis” (BIA) before planning for disaster recovery at any organization, BIA is essential to success your disaster recovery planning, no matter how you do it whether by using computer software, survey, interview …etc., and by internal team or external team through contract with outsourcing company.

The benefits of BIA are to gather information to help the organization in planning for disaster recovery , design the disaster recovery site and prioritize computer application and software used by business/functional departments and keep the IT people focused on achieving the goals and objectives of disaster recovery.

BIA is a tool to document information about applications; all information will be analyzed to help the organization in disaster recovery planning. Sometimes you need experts to handle analyzing BIAs and document all analysis results to develop accurate disaster recovery plans.

The continent of BIA template is include but not limited to:

          1-      Name of application,

          2-      Department name,

          3-      Work hours for this application (i.e from 8:00 Am to 9:00 Am),

          4-      Number of users,

          5-      Effect on organization ( i.e Reputation, Cost, Legal..etc),

          6-      Key process for the application (i.e Reports to government, customer service, billing…etc.),

          7-      There is any alternative procedure when application is down,

          8-      Related Hardware and Software,

          9-      Infrastructure needed, and

          10-   Application administrator name.

Starting Customer Care Service

I don’t want to talk here about IT service provider to external customer or client, my post for IT people placed in the same organization with business departments.

IT people have customers so the IT people should know the customer care, how to deal with their customers and keeping them satisfied is one of the major responsibilities for IT people. Customers of IT are all people use the applications, computers and all IT services and solutions. In any organization IT people implement IT services and solutions, what about after implementation services (warranty, maintenance, spare parts …etc.). All customers like to be satisfied about services, IT people customers so.

Many of IT People don’t know the basic principles to serve their customers, what is the impact?

“If don’t care about your customers you will lose your business”. IT people will lose their business when they ignore customer care, negative impact will report to the management about bad service or non qualified services.

What IT people have to do to keep their customers satisfied?

My advices here are:

1.      Be careful about customer’s needs.

2.      Solve incidents and problems quickly.

3.      Develop a service improvement plan.

4.      Implement updates as needed.

5.      Monitor and control IT environment.

6.      Try to automate all customer procedures and functions if applicable.

7.      Practice customers on new IT features related to customers work.

8.      Teach IT teams how to resolve conflicts and disputes, and how to communicate to their customers.

9.      Sign service level agreement (SLA) between IT and business departments.

Incidents should be visible

One of reasons to employing IT people is to manage and resolve daily incidents, but not all organizations believe the helpdesk will be a very good tool to ease the communication between end users or customers and IT People, some of organizations use telephone, email or fax to report incidents to IT people, it’s applicable for small business, but what about 500+ employees with 50+ application and 200,000 customer?

We have to care bout incidents, some incidents cost the organizations time and money, IT people should track all incidents till resolved; with phone, email or fax not all incidents will appear to IT people  on a proper time which means cost the organization more money and time, you can’t create a decision reports to resolve the root cause of high frequency incidents, no report about IT employees performance, no priorities for incidents.

What about one communication channel between IT people and end users or customers, this channel offer a documentation for all incidents, categorized and prioritized incidents, monitor and control resolutions and maybe escalate unresolved incident to higher level technician, what about employee’s evaluations about their work on incidents resolution, and logging all resolutions in a Known Error Database, all those benefits and more can be easily implemented by using helpdesk systems.

IT people should view all incidents in a proper time, so the incidents should be visible all the time.