Collaboration

[Grey, Gretchen]

Title: Collaboration

This is a follow up for those of you who attended the Principles of Business Continuity workshop hosted by Merit (we had too much fun, huh?). You may recall one area of great interest among most participants was collaboration and shared solutions for disaster recovery. We discussed issues such as trading rack space, shared hot sites and related Mutual Aid Agreements / Service Level Agreements. We made a "laundry list" of challenges in finding partners and cultivating such relationships. I ran across this article on availability.com (if I didn't already mention this site, it's pretty good for the technically oriented, but gets 'advertisment-ly' at times) and thought you may find it of interest.

Gretchen

Strategic Alliances: A CIO Opportunity To Recover From Disaster And Make Friends While You’re At It
December 13, 2005

True strategic alliance between business partners, vendors and others is a means of ensuring business continuity and bolstering quick recovery from disaster.

In fact, disaster-recovery performance has moved to the top of corporate priority lists, according to an online survey of CIOs and other IT professionals conducted from mid-September to early October by the Data Management Institute and Toigo Partners International (www.togiopartners.com) in conjunction with Topio Inc. (www.topio.com). Corporations, the survey found, are placing more emphasis on achieving recovery objectives than on simple data protection.

One valuable way to improve disaster-recovery performance is through strategic alliance. However, it is critical to enter such an alliance with eyes wide open.

10 critical factors
Alliances formed at high levels and often blessed with the designation of “strategic” or “corporate” often fail to deliver real benefits to the partners, according to Benjamin Gomes-Casseres. He is a professor at Brandeis University’s Graduate School of International Economic and Finance (www.brandeis.edu) and a frequent speaker at executive-education seminars and conferences.

Gomes-Casseres notes that an alliance strategy creates the context for the success of individual partnerships, and requires you to address 10 critical factors pertaining to the deal itself:

• Have a clear strategic purpose. Alliances are never an end in themselves. They ought to be tools in service of a business strategy.
• Find a fitting partner. This means one with compatible goals and complementary capabilities.
• Specialize. Allocate tasks and responsibilities in the alliance in a way that enables each partner to do what it does best.
• Create incentives for cooperation. Working together never happens automatically, particularly not when partners were formerly rivals.
• Minimize conflicts between partners. The scope of an alliance and of partners’ roles should avoid pitting one against the other in the market.
• Share information. Continual communication develops trust and keeps joint projects on target.
• Exchange personnel. Regardless of the form of the alliance, personal contact and site visits are essential for maintaining communication and trust.
• Operate with long time horizons. The expectation of future gains enhances mutual forbearance in solving short-term conflicts.
• Develop mutual joint projects. Successful cooperation one on project can help partners weather the storm in less successful joint projects.
• Be flexible. Alliances are open-minded, dynamic relationships that need to evolve in pace with their environment and in pursuit of new opportunities.

In general, John Sloan, senior research analyst for Info Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com), views these as a quite good set of “best practices” in terms of strategic alliances between companies. “You can see how [this set] can be applied in the [disaster-recovery-plan or DRP] spheres – especially in terms of the first one, [having a clear strategic purpose],” he adds. “Strategy should be about identifying what’s core: What do we do, or what do we want to do, that gives us competitive advantages and sets us apart from the crowd. …”

Corporations tend to play their infrastructure issues close to the vest, Sloan observes, because such issues are core to what they do. Therefore, he adds, they do not form strategic infrastructure alliances for DRP – or any other issue.

However, Sloan says, corporations are willing to form strategic alliances, to preserve and protect their supply chain. “There is growth – and there is room for growth – in the area of DRP as it relates to supply chains,” Sloan says. “You can’t just be an island. You have to look at your partners and you have to work with them. … “

11-step action plan
Once your DRP strategic alliance is in place, you need to develop and execute the actual disaster-recovery plan. “The idea is that you want to look at what you have, look at what it’s doing, look at how important it is, and [look at] what your tolerances are for each one of [the steps],” Sloan says.

Sloan recommends an 11-step action plan:

• Define the affected areas – the scope of the plan.
• Build the disaster-recovery planning team.
• Establish a preliminary timetable.
• Create a preliminary report.
• Conduct an operational analysis.
• Perform risk analysis.
• Document systems and applications.
• Identify tolerance for downtime and recovery priority.
• Develop and mandate recovery teams.
• Review materials and assemble and test the plan.
• Publish, promote and maintain the plan.

One critical and sometimes-overlooked piece of a successful DRP plan is “wetware” – i.e. human beings – and how well we perform together to develop and execute such a plan. The human element, Sloan says, is tested when playing out various DRP scenarios.

How high is disaster-recovery planning as a management priority? When it comes at least to mid-sized corporations, it is quite high. In 2005, Info Tech Research Group surveyed approximately 1,400 IT decision-makers in mid-sized organizations – those with 100 to 500 employees and up to $1 billion in annual revenue. The results showed that DRP ties with security planning for first-place honors. “They are very closely related as top-management priorities, so we can infer from that that [DRP] is – and remains – a top actionable priority for a lot of organizations,” Sloan says.

One question that is not as easy to answer is: How consistently do organizations utilize their DRPs? “The level of concern that people have in the resiliency of their company can often be influenced by outside events,” he explains. The indications are that many organizations do continually monitor, update and test their plans annually, he adds, “but not as many [are doing so] as are launching [disaster-recovery] plans.”

Always a work in progress
Recovery professionals had always considered a disaster of the scope that occurred on 9/11 to be a worst-case scenario, observe Albert J. Marcella Jr. and Carol Ann Stucki, authors of Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and Incident Management Planning: A Resource for Ensuring Ongoing Enterprise Operations. It was a scenario no one truly expected to occur and for which no one could have truly prepared.

Since 9/11, Marcella and Stucki conclude, CIOs and other technology executives have been looking for the next definition of a worst-case scenario. Regardless of what that definition may ultimately be, corporations – including those involved in strategic alliances – must be flexible, creative, proactive and diligent in the continuous development, testing, implementation and refinement of disaster-recovery, business-continuity, and incident-management planning.

“It’s not about developing a [disaster-recovery] plan -- it’s about developing a planning practice,” Sloan says, agreeing with Marcella and Stucki and adding, “The idea is, it’s always a work in progress. …”

A cultural shift within the organization may be what is required, to develop and execute successfully a DRP. “It’s a difficult one to cost-justify because it’s like buying insurance. You only find out how good your [disaster-recovery] plan is when you have to use it -- and that’s the last thing you want to have to do.”

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