Why did I start blogging?

I was privileged to be invited to the Kiwi Foo Camp recently in Warkworth. This is an anti-conference that has become etched in the geek fabric of New Zealand. In the bio section of the web site I described myself proudly as a non-blogger….so what has changed?

 On the final day I ran a session entitled: “Technology: Is it destroying more than it creates?”

 I assumed that nobody would be interested in such a melancholic subject but was pleasantly surprised to watch the room slowly fill up. Even more surprising was that a robust and inclusive debate followed with, I think, a general agreement that something is going wrong.

 It was this discussion that has inspired me to add a little voice – with questionable journalistic skills - to this movement and share some of my thoughts and views with you all.

 Where to start?

 I was wondering where to start when I called a friend this morning to receive the following response from the answering service person:

 “Hi can I help you – sorry I don’t know what company you’re trying to call we’re rebooting our server.”

 Now this is a perfect example of what I was hoping to discuss in my blog, one would assume that an answering service’s primary requirement would be to recognise which of its clients are being called. To me that would mean that the system that provided that capability would always be available….and I mean ALWAYS! But no, it’s much easier to blame failures of the technology than it is to invest money in making sure they never fail. Why is this?

 My experience is that when solutions are designed they rarely include an assumption that one day they will be mission critical. This is especially the case when a company is buying in a solution from a specific supplier. If cost is the main reason a customer uses to purchase a supplier would be insane to include the ability to enable fault tolerance – it’s never cheap. So we buy the system, it becomes crucial for our business and then when we ask it to be made fault tolerant we either get a “Sorry” or a huge bill to upgrade. It’s always ugly.

 ADVICE: How do we protect ourselves from this dilemma? When buying any system that is critical in running your business assume that some day it will need to be “always up”. Challenge your suppliers to explain how this can be done and map out how this will be achieved in the future and what, importantly, indicative costs will be incurred. If they can’t - don’t buy it!