But imagine coming to work and finding a co-worker feeling unwell – “It’s just a wog” they moan. As you step into the cool air-conditioned environment their germs are equitably and generously distributed to everyone else and pretty soon you have an epidemic. You ship the co-worker off to the doctor and the prognosis is terminal - Avian flu and all staff must remain in the office until the medical quarantine authorities get there…
Apart from the potential mortality rate you have to ask what an external threat like Avian flu, terrorism, fire, earthquake or extended loss of power could do to your business and what you can do to keep a business going. Not surprisingly IT is now a very large part of the answer.
One of the recommendations of reducing the impact of a pandemic is to stop people gathering together (to infect each other) i.e. being able to work from home. If your business must continue (and very few businesses could afford to shut down for days, weeks or months) then you need to prepare for this scenario.
I don’t have the space here to fully advise you but here are a few tips to get started on bullet proofing your business.
• Re-locate your business servers to special collocation facilities (most ISP’s have these) where they have emergency power, fire protection, backup and security and more importantly high speed access to the internet (at least 100Mbps).
• Set up a full duplex virtual private network (VPN) between your office and the collocation facility – again your ISP can help here.
• Set up Terminal Services or Citrix to allow staff to access the remote servers via the internet from home or work.
• Invest in a Voice over IP phone system to allow phone calls to be seamlessly distributed using the internet – standard PABX phone systems can’t do this.
• Make sure all senior staff have broadband access (512Kbps is fine) from home – pay for it if necessary.
• Develop a telecommuting policy that actively encourages staff to work responsibly from home, not all the time but as often as possible.
• Realise that very soon large expensive offices and formerly occupied desks will be unnecessary – virtual offices will rule.
Event Planners has done just that – our data and phone system is accessible from anywhere in the world via the internet. I could be writing this from a beach (but I would probably get sand in the keyboard) provided there is internet access.
Every business, small or large, must begin to plan for potential business disruptions that, without preparation, may kill not only you, but your business.
Post script
My story in the February edition of mice.net about the investment in IT that PCOs need to make produced some interesting comments. The larger PCOs agreed thoroughly with my assessment (that Event Planners’ investment of more than $1/2 million in IT just to do its job was justified) saying that they had all tried to save on IT in the past only to be critically bitten when workloads or delegate numbers increased. These players have all spent between a low end of $5000 and a high end of $10,000 per seat (staff member) to provide a stable, reliable, reasonably featured IT system. All admit they will have to spend a lot more, especially if they are to embrace VoIP, telecommuting and disaster recovery.
In contrast a PCO with four staff commented “We get by with a single Microsoft Small Business Server, laptops, summit light and ADSL connection.” The fact is that they had actually spent about $8000 per seat and sadly their choices have limited their business growth. This PCO has just landed a 1000 plus pax event in 2008 along with several hundred speaker abstracts and papers to process and their system simply won’t cope without extensive and costly software, hardware and internet upgrades. Caveat Emptor – clients using a PCO now need to perform due diligence on their IT system.
Ray Shaw is an accredited meeting manager (AMM), IT journalist and Chairman of Event Planners Australia. To contact him, email ray@im.com.au or visit www.eventplanners.com.au.
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