As we start to come up to the time of year between turkeys (Thanksgiving to Christmas) I would like to share a story from the Black Swan.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb discusses the impact of randomness in his book, The Black Swan. In the introduction to the book he gives the description of the life of a turkey. After the Turkey is born it is moved to a farm where everyday the famer feeds and cares for the turkey. The turkey is getting accustomed to this lifestyle. This is what he was destined for — a life where everything is handed to you. Everyday, as sure as the sun rises, he is fed and cared for. Each day reinforces this perspective for five or six months until the hand that feeds him wrings his neck. This is a shock, a complete and utter surprise to the turkey!

His life ends with a complete failure of his worldview. Everything he had learned and was reinforced on a daily basis was upset on that final day. It didn’t make sense that such a shocking and ‘random’ event would occur to the turkey; however, it made perfect sense to the farmer. Taleb covers other random events and challenges the reader to think or rethink their perspective, preparedness and understanding of randomness. There are practical applications for performance management, systems design and other more practical aspects of life in Taleb’s book The Black Swan, Second Edition, Random House, New York.

Charlie Sheen, and a bunch of other celebrities aside. Your website is not about you, well it is; but it should be about your customers, clients, students, members or donors and their needs desires and aspirations.

In the same way internet marketing is not about you or me it is about our clients. These are the folks that ultimately pay our bills when they allow us to provide those goods and services that ultimately meet their needs and desires. Before we worry about the internet technology and services we need to make sure that our internet promotion has a solid foundation in marketing.

Step 1: Who is your audience?
Before we build or upgrade a website we should consider who is the audience? If we plan an event for an audience of 20,000 fans what are we going to do? Is it a sporting event? Where do you find the sports fans? What do they have in common? What are their issues, desires and aspirations? Then how do you get them to drive themselves to the event (your website)?

The basic marketing questions answer how we can connect and satisfy those needs and aspirations. What is your primary market? What is their background, needs and uses. How have you historically supplied them? Then there are secondary markets and influencers. What is the background and the needs or your influencers or recommenders? Before we engage in any discussion of web site design, social media, or any technology it is helpful if you have a profile of your ideal client.

Build a client profile. Saddleback Community church has a profile of Saddleback Sam. This is a composite of the families in the area. Whenever they are considering a new program or offering they consider how this would impact Saddleback Sam. Now reflect on your client profile and how you meet their known needs. This will guide the content that is generated on your website.

Step 2: Your Goals
Define your goals for the website. The website can be platform to say how wonderful you are. Most websites succeed at that; however, they don’t drive more sales, subscriptions, sign-ups or donations. You need to be specific about your goals for each segment of your audience. In most cases you want your primary group to buy your service. There will be a secondary group that you want to recommend your service. You want to make it easy to buy or recommend.

 
Step 3: The Website:
You can build a pretty website that looks nice, but without content no one will come. In marketing on the Internet content is King – content geared to clients is the real King. It drives search engine optimization and gives your audience something meaningful to consume. You can pay per click, pay for directories and pay for facebook ads – if you don’t have what your audience is looking for they will flee from your website within seconds. The money spent driving them to your website would be wasted.

A lot of money and effort can go into graphic designs to make the website look pretty. Most of that money is wasted if no one shows up. It is also a waste of money to have three or four pretty pages and no meaningful, engaging content for your prospective client. You need to balance the two factors in website design. The look and feel of the website should not drive people away. You need to get a clean, simple, easy to read website design. You need that so your audience can find what they want and enjoy the experience of getting the information from your website. You want them to enjoy the experience so much that they will recommend it to their friends as well as return for more information or to buy or to donate. You will need to spend some money on a pleasing website design, but you need have some cash left over to keep it updated and fresh over time so that your audience will come back for more.

Coming to your website to find information and use your product or service should be a positive experience. It is critical that the casual prospective user to your site can find it fast and find it friendly. It has to be positive experience for them. The look needs to be professional and polished. The user should be able to find the information they need within a few clicks of the mouse.

Step 4: Content
If you want to be found the gold standard is to provide quality content. It makes it easy to be found naturally as well as it has better relevance (and potentially lower costs) for paid traffic. The first thing is to provide quality content and keep it updated. Most business owners or managers personally don’t have the time or energy to keep their website updated so they will need to set the tone and the direction. You need to budget resources so that the content meets you audience needs and it stays fresh or they will switch to another channel. That content can include technical product sheets, operation manuals, repair manuals, case studies, pictures, video interviews. It can include almost anything, in any format, as long as it is relevant to your audience.

Now that we have the relevant content, the next step is to make it visible and ensure that it gets found on the internet. If you are used to the yellow page phone directory users were trained to find the solution to their problem. If there was a leak you would look up plumber. On the internet we would want to ensure that the problem and the solution can be found easily. So we would want to ensure that your plumbing company could be found for local users as well as your company would be found when someone typed in “fix leak” in their favourite search engine.

When you have the content then it becomes easy to find the key words, perform search engine optimization, do the back links, buy pay per click and a host of ‘other stuff’ to make sure that your potential audience finds you on the internet.

Step 5: Social media
Did we say we wanted your clients to come back and recommend the site to their friends? That is the basis of social media. You can spend thousands of dollars trumpeting how wonderful you are, but when your clients tell their friends about the excellent product, service or experience they had with your organization it is worth more than a slick ad in a glossy magazine or a one minute spot during the super bowl. The emergence of Facebook, Linkedin and other social media sites has allowed recommendations and complaints to travel at the speed of light. If the story or recommendation touches a deep longing or need it can go viral!

Going viral is more about Theology, philosophy and Maslow’s hierarchy than it is about technology.
It is more than I can cover at this time in this long over due entry.

I wonder who is a friend on facebook, and is facebook our friend?

The amount that can be sucked into making updates on facebook is crazy!
It is a great tool; however, when we foregoe maintaining real relationships to build our estate in farmville or to increase our virtual friend count, there is something amiss.

I go back to a cursory view of Maslow’s needs. In North America and Western Europe our basic security needs of food, shelter and sleep are covered. It appears that we have this insatiable social appitite that needs to be fed before we can move up the chain to self actualization. My guess is that facebook is to friends as soda pop is to our diet – a quick sugar fix without really meeting the long term social health or fitness concerns. This has implications both in our private and work lives.

Some businesses are all for social media in the hope that they have found another platform to propogate their message to buy their product or service. For many other businesses Facebook is an enigma. People use it as their primary form of communication and the business has no voice in that conversation. Worst yet, their staff spend time during the work day with a browser parked on facebook minimized so that the supervisor can not see. Unfortunately for some staff, the network technician has the technology available to track their online activity!

I could rant about the “evils” of Facebook, but that would be pointless. A few years back I spoke at a school convention in Sacramento on internet content filtering. Next door MySpace (remember them?) was hosting a conference. Back then I noted that it was not MySpace that was the issue – it was a tool and another one would come along and it did. The issue for most high school teens, is that with their basic security needs met, their entire lives depend on their social needs. The challenge for educators and employers is to motivate those within our sphere of influence to transcend their current situation and “needs” to a bigger, greater vision.

When I see myself as a critical part in a project or a mission I will not have time to update my facebook status about the latest meal I ate or about the dog’s mess on the rug! I will trade my time spent on farmville to engage in helping others get access to clean water or micro financing an agricultural project.

For my business and school clients who do not have the tools to motivate those in their care to a higher or better use of facebook I will provide a link below to band aid the problem (block facebook)

http://www.netsentron.com/block-facebook/

Sometimes we think we need to find something totally revolutionary to develop the ‘killer app.’ – That may not be the case.

It is much more an issue of being at the cross roads of the user and the product, service or technology where we can bring or extend what we have to solve a specific problem better.

Two examples I would give include:

1) Google – most of us forget there were search engines before Google (remember yahoo, Alta vista, ask jeeves etc.) The founders came up with an algorithm (most relevant back links) to give better search results. In designing the solution Google was not looking to steal “yahoo customers”. Their solution was to solve a problem that yahoo and most others did not address that well. Google has since revised their algorithm to make the results even more relevant and to bypass the fake search engine optimization tricks.

2) IPod – the IPod classic was a single platter hard drive of 5GB or 10GB so you could store 1000s of audio clips. It eliminated the problem of storing and shuffling MP3s from your hard drive to the MP3 player. After the basic break through there were additional improvements and expansions on the idea. The IPod classic has had six major releases and 1 or 2 minor releases within each major release over the course of nine years.

So what does that mean for us?

This means that we can take our understanding of our solutions (our product) and shape them so that we can solve our client’s problem better AND the initial implementation does not have to be perfect. Our niche would probably not be in doing something completely different – with 100 to 250+ products, services or companies in any market segment most angles would be covered; however, there may not be any one dominant player. So there is still an opportunity to do the job better. Doing the job better might just be the “free prize inside” of the cereal box. Everyone in the market could do the job – so the differentiating factor in our product or service is something on the edge of what is delivered. It could be a client portal, it could be extra training and seminars, or it could be an extra “bonus” service that we take for granted.

The ‘killer app’ is not a fugitive – it is in our midst in disguise!
Our mission, from an administrative and marketing perspective, is to unmask that ‘killer app.’

Ten years ago there was all this hype about Y2K. You would have thought the world was going to come to an end! Many clients updated their hardware and software to be Y2K compatible. For some of our clients we had them test their software on one of our servers with the clock set in the period of December 31st 1999 to January 2000. Many people spent too much money on the ordeal!

The good news for the technology industry, in the short term, was the dot.com bubble. After spending too much money on Y2K too much money was spent on anything with a .com. You could set up a business plan and even call it “losing money .com” and get investors to sponsor your plan. It was not about providing a service of value to society – it was about getting something started and selling out to a big fish or going public fast enough that making a profit was someone else’s problem! The plan was to last long enough until you go IPO (Initial Public Offering). While the .com euphoria decried the bricks and mortal businesses the companies that made the real money were the equipment suppliers and UPS.

After the .com bubble burst there was spare bandwidth and computers for some time. The first half of the decade there was a rationalization of capacity. Out of the ashes of all the spare hardware and internet capacity came start ups like Google. Other firms like Amazon.com and eBay had the time and resources and got the business plan right!

When the bubble burst any money that was left over went into real estate and the technology went in to the foundations of the web 2.0. You saw the results first in sites like Myspace and now in Facebook. When there was no cash to spend on crazy perks the money that was left had to be carefully allocated to the best return on an idea or investment.

The Death of ROI

Typically we think of ROI as Return on Investment. In the last two years I would say that idea is dead. People are not worried about the rate of return on their investment; their first concern is the return OF their investment. With equity investments evaporating faster than the polar ice caps investors are looking for a sure return on the money they invest – whether it was money deposited on a GIC or an investment in information technology – they want to make sure that they will get their money back either as cash plus interest or in hard savings in operational costs.

We saw that with Microsoft’s introduction of Vista into the Enterprise. It was slow to get in since there was no real return on investment. They would try to prod companies with the threat of dropping support of XP. Now there are options. There was no measureable return for the Vista investment. Options included staying with XP, going to MAC or Linux.

Looking Forward into the Clouds

The current financial cloud has reinforced that any cost or investment needs a payback. Either you will choose an IT investment that requires little investment or an overwhelming return. Enter SAAS (Software as a Service) and cloud computing.

The concept of the cloud has it roots in the .com bubble of years gone by. Now we have solid companies making hard investments in data centers with the technology and capacity to handle the computing requirements for the enterprise. In one sense it is back to old timeshare model with newer and friendlier technology. Cloud computing is using the data center investment of your provider plus the internet for the connectivity so that you can do your organizational computing anywhere you want, whenever you want or need. Basically all of the hardware and the management of it is in a central location.

Another acronym to introduce is HAAS (Hardware as a service). This extends the concept of leasing your hardware to a full service lease. Basically you rent a managed firewall. You don’t have to make an investment in the firewall and you don’t need the expertise to keep it up to date or to configure it. It is like a contract you would have with the phone or cable or utility company. The difference here is that the hardware is located at your site. Examples would include the managed firewall, the managed application server or a managed back-up service that includes an onsite back-up server.

We have been working on bringing enterprise class computing to our clients. We work on behalf of our clients to select the solution and model that best meets their needs. The above was a very brief overview of some history and current models.

Somewhere along the line I need to figure out how my work and the rest of life fit together. At the end of the line most people would not say “I wish I spent more time in the office”. This is an attempt to harmonize, or synchronize, my philosophy (or theology) of work. I get to do it with the recent (word press) technology tools.

A great perversion in our modern times has been holding up the protestant work ethic. There is nothing wrong with working and hard work; however, the perversion is that it has been ripped apart from a biblical norm and been infused with secular values. Work exists for works sake or work exists so I can make money so I can spend my money on what I want is divorced from being God’s steward appointed to tend the garden or care for his sheep.

In my youth I was given the quote from Genesis 3:19 “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food”. It was given to me to reinforce the value of hard work – the true work ethic. Even before I understood the full context of the passage I took it as the curse that it really was!

Another trend we can track is the trivialization of work. From the economic perspective of Karl Marx he observed the “deskilling” of the workforce and the intensification of capital investment. You can the see the dehumanization of the “worker” comically portrayed in the classic Charlie Chaplin 1936 film Modern Times; the worker literally becomes part of the machinery. The work and the worker get parceled into smaller more meaningless units. In the office environment work is made trivial as work life takes on a new meaning as the focus is to look powerful or successful, rather than actually executing any skilled work.

Our horizons shorten to the task at hand or may go so far as using work to help extend our social network. We need to expand our horizons on work from a particular task at hand to include our vocation and calling. It is the combination of our talents aligned with our passions. Either we have been trained and disciplined in our life’s calling, or by circumstances, we have been thrown into a situation and given the grace and natural gifts that our efforts will actually yield results. Work is also more than an individual effort. We may be assigned or called to execute certain work related tasks; however, those tasks are for others within our community. For those of us who live at work for a payday, work is a basic exchange of our time and energy for money. Even in that basic exchange there is an interaction within our work community. For those who like their work, gain personal fulfillment, and see it as a calling, they can look beyond the specific task and see how their actions impact others they work with and those they serve. Work and worship are both public theatre. We perform our work to serve others. Whether the work is entertainment, service or a supply of goods it is done in the context of a community.

Our work is our mission. How we work is a reflection of who we work for. Jesus gave the parable of the talents that reflects a biblical value on work. In fact our use of the word talent comes from this monetary measure of wealth in this parable in Matthew 25. The master went away and entrusted various amounts with each of his servants. They had the complete and full freedom to do as they pleased with the treasure given to them on behalf of their master. In the case of two of them, they invested what they were given immediately and it produced a full return. They doubled what was given. In the case of one servant he chose to stick the money in the ground. He didn’t even consider entrusting the money to the current banking establishment. He did nothing. Over the time even the one talent that was given was devalued. The first two servants were rewarded with praise and more talents. The third servant was rebuked and rejected.

Originally man (Adam) was placed in the garden and was given full authority over the garden and was assigned to tend to it. With the work came the responsibilities and rewards of tending the garden. The “work” went beyond a 9 – 5 job; “tending the garden” can include raising crops as well as raising children, building houses as well as building up our spouse or our business. Our work can be a very real and material reflection of our worship as we build one another up within the community that we are placed in. The quality of work then becomes a reflection of ourselves as well the quality of the individual we are working for.

The curse mentioned in Genesis 3 is at the root of the toil and struggle that we have in work and that we have with work. Whether we are struggling with a computer malfunction, a misunderstanding with a client or colleague, or reviewing the damage from a hail storm; there is a sense that our work is riddled with problems. The circumstances that we find ourselves are not always ideal; in fact in some cases our work is dependant on solving the problems of other people’s misery. In workplace literature the stress and adversity that we encounter at work is seldom a result of over coming the big hairy audacious goal. The source of most work stress is dealing with the continuous drizzle of small problems and issues that get in the way of achieving our goals. The problems stem from poor relationships, a lack of mutual esteem, or a low sense of the value of the specific task or work. This results in misunderstandings and a poor quality of service that may support others in the organization. The support worker that does not feel appreciated forms a low sense of worth for the task and their colleagues. This may result in carelessness in the outcome of the task at hand. Those around are poorly served and get frustrated with the person and then treat them with contempt. The carelessness and the contempt can soon spread like a virus so that the toil at work increases for diminishing results. This is an outcome of the curse. It is not just the land that is cursed! Work and life becomes a brutal existence until we return to the ground which was cursed.

There is a longing to escape the curse of the soil and the toil. One solution is for the weekly purchase of the lottery ticket which is sold as a ticket to paradise and freedom from the curse. The odds of winning big in the lottery are typically greater than 10,000,000 to 1! There may be hope that you can redeem the winning lottery ticket; however, the odds are better to find personal redemption in being connected and part of a redeemed community. There is hope, here and now, for a taste of the future redemption. Partial redemption may be found in fulfilling work.

Most people would not turn down the opportunity to work for the President of the United States. There would be a sense that you are close to power and that the work within the President’s office would make a difference for millions. The chances of working for the President are even worse than winning a lottery; however, we do have a chance to change our focus to work for the most high king – God almighty. Within the community of faith, the members of the kingdom are called to be servants of God the King. Regardless of our current vocation we are to do work worthy of Him. Brother Lawrence was a lay brother in a monastery in France. Most of his time was consumed with the daily toil of the kitchen. He became lord of the pots and pans. Later in life, as his health declined, his work shifted to repairing the sandals of over 100 monks in the monastery. This was humble and demeaning work, yet it had to get done. Brother Lawrence was not a learned man, since he was not trained in Latin he was inducted into the monastery as a lay brother. His work was to be at the beck and call of the friars. Yet it was his practice of the presence of God in his work in the kitchen that brought Brother Lawrence to the attention of others within the monastery. His wisdom as reflected in his work was later compiled by Father Joseph de Beaufort and published as The Practice of the Presence of God.

In the seventeenth century Brother Lawrence did not have much time to formally worship God; however, he set an example for others to emulate in the reflection of our work. Our work extends beyond the formal hours that we are engaged in active service. Our work can also extend to time spend volunteering in the community or public service. In all our activity we are called to reflect that our work would be seasoned with the quality and grace of a master craftsman for our king. On the Soccer pitch I encourage our team that we are delivering a command performance before our King. Our work, and play, is to be an outward and material reflection of our worship. In the Gospel of John 2: 1 – 11 there is the story of Jesus at the wedding at Cana. The story tells about an early miracle. It also reflects the quality of the miracle. The water that was transformed by Jesus was no ordinary wine. It was the best quality wine of the wedding feast. While not everyone understood what happened at the wedding the disciples and those close to Jesus understood the full meaning of the miracle.

Finally, the definition of work goes beyond the expanded scope of “doing things”. Work is within the context of a community. That community starts with where we work and expands through out a network or building relationships. The quality of our work and our relationships can make us subversive changes agents, warriors and ambassadors, for the kingdom. After the people of Israel fled Egypt they were given the task of building the tabernacle, a portable series of curtains and props. God gave clear instructions to Moses on what was to be done and he gave people the skill to complete the task. A second example of our work as worship would in the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was a German composer that lived from 1685 to 1750 and his compositions became the epitome of the baroque style of music. His work included working for both the court and the church. His final appointment included working in Leipzig for the school and church. His work had an impact in the lives of people at the time to now. His last two works included The Art of the Fugue which was left unfinished and published after his death. There are attempts to finish the last movement of this work; however, Bach stopped the work and dictated his final work which was Before thy throne I now appear. At the end of every work, sacred or secular, Bach also added three letters S.D.G for Solo Deo Gloria. He could have taken all the praise for his talent, but his reformation principles were deeply ingrained in his life and reflected in his work. Glory was reflected where glory was due. Our work, whether for pay or passion, has been given as a very material way to reflect our worship.

In that sense, and the example given by Bach, I trust that God has also given us the skills and desire to execute our work and worship with excellence for His Glory.

It is October which means Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Canadian Thanksgiving, Halloween and a bunch of stuff in between.

A couple years ago my 11 year old son had a school assignment during February on the human heart – the blood pump that we all have. So it is not too far fetched that some school teacher will give their high school students an assignment in October to research breast cancer.

Let us put ourselves in the shoes of Johnny the 14 year old boy assigned to do research on breast cancer. He goes to the internet at school and uses his favorite search engine to find out about breast cancer. What do you think he gets? It would be the cancer society, walk for the cure and perhaps the Susan Komen foundation. Some really solid stuff.

Johnny, in true spirit of research makes the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the cancer and size. So now he enters “big breasts” in the search engine. What do you think he gets?

In most cases he would get the search engine results of porn sites. Even with safe search on the first page results will not be what most parents and teachers would want Johnny spending his day at school reviewing.

This month we are testing a new release of the netsentron content filter so it will eventually be even smarter. Most content filters are a basic url blacklist – they block the requests of known sites. The intelligent content filter goes one step further and blocks the content of the sites. So the search engine results full of pornography sites would be blocked.

More information on the intelligent content filter can be found at: http://www.netsentron.com/specs/intelligent-content-filtering/

Nothing is “free”. Someone has paid for it. Whether it is investors that have been bilked by some promoter bringing us back to the bad business models of the dot.com days or a naive business team hoping that Micro$oft will buy them out – someone has to pay for the development and the delivery of the software or the service.

At the heart of the business model is the value proposition for the target markets. If the market doesn’t value the service then free is what it has to be offered at. Then the product or service should be considered as a byproduct of another product or service.

Google fits that model. The superb search engine is the platform to create the network of people coming to their site. Now they have an audience far bigger than the old American Network Televisions combined. The free search engine is the new platform for targeted advertising. Like the old TV networks, the shows were free for the consumer, the advertisers paid the costs plus a premium to deliver the shows and their message.

If the service or software saves me time or money then I will allow for some cash to leave my wallet in exchange for the something I value. The service does not have to be free. We have this issue or misunderstanding with open source software. Clients think open source is free like “free beer” rather “free speech”. It then comes down to an issue of how you charge for your service. So the software can be free but you would then charge for the support or other related services. The freedom is in the freedom to modify and chose.

As I contemplate marketing, competitive strategy and sustainable business models it brings me back to the core value proposition that we can offer our clients. Technology allows organizations to rethink the content and delivery mechanisms and the “value chain” of their internal processes. Content, like this blog, can be delivered for “free”. In the case of higher education the content delivery costs can approach zero as distance delivery models utilize the internet. So the pricing for course outlines and content could be free even though there is a cost developing the materials.

How are schools to survive against free? The organization will have to rethink who is the customer, what do they want and what do they value? In the case of students free is good, but it will not buy a degree. The information could be given for free. It helps guys like me who want to sit in on a Latin course for free out of interest, but do not need it for any certification or professional designation. The cost of delivery over the internet or in the classroom is negligible. The cost for interaction, guidance and marking is more than zero. So the business model for higher education may need to be refined where we identify our clients, what they value and how we deliver the content. So the course outline and lectures can be delivered online for “free”. In essence it is a byproduct of the learning or education process. So what students value and pay for is the transformation.

Back to technology and trade. Internet technology has allowed us to deliver software and services faster and cheaper than some traditional methods. Rather than drive to a client site with a tape. I can go over the internet and transfer the software on their machine, test it, and put it live in less time than it takes to drive there. It has raised my infra structure costs slightly and lowered the “billable time” for the one instance; however, it has also allowed me more time to do other higher value projects, rather than listen to the radio in my car as I drive to a client site. The marginal cost to deliver the software, rather than courier a tape, has approached zero. In our case internet technology has allowed us to be more responsive and lower the time of the project while raising the overhead costs (the secure internet connection) slightly. My clients do not value the drive time; however, they do value the transformation of the business process that we deliver with the new software that has been installed.

If technology does not deliver a transformation or savings then the only price that I could put on it is free.

This morning started with two client issues before I left home. One was a VPN ISSUE easily dealt with. The second issue looked simple – the PO’s didn’t print! The symptoms lead to something more sinister.

The POs did not print because the weekly back-up did not complete so things were stuck in the batch queue. It needed a new initialized tape. Kevin went over to initialize tapes when the orange light went on the front of the CPU – not a good sign! It turned out that a hard drive had failed and the system froze.

One drive failing in a RAID set should not make the system come to its knees. The idea of RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is that the data is written on one drive and a portion of other drives has a key to reconstruct the one drive when it fails. If one drive on the Hard Drive array fails the system would be slow but it should not come to a stop! Now Kevin is in major diagnostic and fire fighting role. Call the office, get the client’s IBM customer number and place a severity one call. It looks like either the RAID controller card or a hard drive has failed, so IBM dispatches one of their technicians with the replacement parts to the site.

We have done the disaster recovery planning in the past. So we are prepared for a hard drive failure, the problem is in this case one drive went and system went down. Also the tape backup failed. So there is not a current tape backup and we are not sure that RAID set will rebuild the data once the failing hard drive is replaced. We are dealing with an IBM i5 (AS/400 or i series) it is not expected to fail; however, we did put in one more piece in the back-up recovery plan. We had set-up an AS/400 to AS/400 offsite data storage.
We also monitor our client’s servers and there was a problem with their internet connection going up and down over the weekend and that interrupted the update of the offsite data storage. The good news is when the internet connection went down – the system reconnected and retried sending the data across to our site. It turned out that we got a completed offsite back-up at 2:00AM on the Monday.

I came to visit to see how things were going and the concern was not one but two drives had failed in the RAID set – now it could not be reconstructed we would have to restore from tape. The plan at that point was:
1) Have IBM work on the hard drive recovery
2) Go back to the office and build a recovery tape from the offsite data storage.

A few hours later they were able to get the replacement disk running and rebuilt.
As the users were signing on a second drive failed. The IBM technician showed the error messages on the screen. It actually looked like errors from two drives about to fail! It meant the IBM service rep had to go and pick-up two more drives as Kevin monitored the progress of the recovery and prepared for a full recovery (from tapes)

By the end of the day 5:15 the drives were replaced and client was fully back in business.
I checked the monitor and the system was up and running.

Lessons learned:
1) We planned for some disasters
2) The “disaster” was not as much as a disaster because of planning and process in place
3) The nature of the disaster was not what was expected.
- A hard drive failure should never have generated the system failure experienced
- There was also the tape failure so there was no tape back-up
- There was a offsite backup that was available even though it’s use was anticipated in occasions of fire or theft.
4) For the $42/month it was well worth the peace of mind for the client that we had an image of their data from the day before.
5) The accumulation a few small things (Tape & Drive) made the failure of the one hard drive a much bigger event than anticipated.

I have spent the last two days reviewing our CIS release 6.0 General Ledger for a potential client. They would like a “demo” of the software. I had go over all the functions and features and load some data into the software to test or demonstrate the capability of the software. Our clients still use the “green screen” software; however, they use it with IBM Client Access software or through a web browser.

We have all but abandoned promoting the green screen software as “everyone” wants the latest and greatest in technology. We have joined the stampede by developing a LAMP based (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) enterprise level application. There are challenges in making sure the software performs efficiently and securely.

The reflection was as I was going through the green screen application may not be pretty but it is effective.
It runs securely and effeciently on the IBM i series. It is not pretty but it works! As I was going through all the functions and features I noticed that the mature application is rich in capability. So we may be abandoning the old faithful “green screen” for the younger, prettier and less capable PHP application. Over time the new application will have the capabilities of the old. Until then maybe this potential new client is on to something. Their requirements go beyond the basics of just posting a General Ledger Journal Entry and printing a few canned reports. They are looking for a system with capability. In this time of “green” computing it may save a few cpu cycles and a system upgrade by staying with the old rather than chasing after the new.

There is a csae for the new technology. That is what they teach in school. Even if the old technology is good you still need someone to support it. In this particular case the client has someone available to support and update the application. As Business Technology professionals we are expected to be up to date on the latest technology; meanwhile, this request has reminded me that the best business solution for a client isn’t always the newest technology.