Technology Blog »

The 3-minute consultancy

Here’s a piece of free consultancy I came up with years ago before the advent of the web, and which still generally holds good. Without knowing anything about it I’m willing to bet your organization has problems in one or more of the following areas:

• Security
• Integration
• Change management

Let’s look at each in turn. First security, which I mean in the broadest sense. The commonest area of risk in my experience is that of data backup. Do you back up everything you should? Do you test the restore process? If you don’t, you don’t need to worry about hackers: a mere hard drive crash could imperil your business.

Years ago, I was working with a government organization which shall remain nameless. In the advent of an emergency they had exhaustive plans set out, including the use of military aircraft to transport the latest backup tapes to a facility at which they planned to run their computer systems. All very laudable.

However, when I was contracted to perform a test of the data restore part of the process – for the very first time after years of daily backups – I discovered that they’d been backing up the wrong things in the wrong way. The tapes I’d been given were absolutely useless. Fortunately for the jobs of those responsible there’d never been a need to restore data from them.

That was an example of where it is possible to be blithely unaware of the existence of a problem. With integration it is more often the case that the problem is well known, but put up with, usually because of a combination of inertia and lack of technical awareness. Do you, for example, have people in your organization printing off data from one system and manually typing it in again at another?

The worst case I ever encountered was where a screen had to be watched day and night in case a particular message appeared, at which point a very simple (and eminently automatable) action had to be taken. A couple of days’ work to fix – after several operator years had been spent in the most tedious way imaginable.

As for our change management problems, most of the time we should blame the developers of applications for their lack of insight. Systems which can’t tell you what changed, when, and why, are still far too commonplace. Unfortunately change management is rarely on the checklist of features when it comes to choosing a software package.

With the advent of the web, there are new opportunities for the “instant consultant”. To the three listed above you can add problems under the following headings:

• Usability
• Accessibility
• Cross-browser compatibility

Each of these can be experienced at far too many websites. Web designers have to become far more conscious of the real consumers of their work: not their client but the end user.

There you are then: free, high-quality consultancy. What’s that? How about isolating and fixing these problems? Sure, but that’s the part that’s definitely not for free! (But get in touch and I’ll happily give you a quote.)