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Executive Guide to Preventing Information Technology Disasters
Richard Ennals
Springer-Verlag, 1995, 186pp, softbound, DM45.00
ISBN 3 540 19928 4
A Review by Adrian Larner for the Computer Journal
This book does contain a few pages on the disaster recovery plans of Kingston Business School (where the author teaches), of which other academic institutions might well take note. Also, it says, the Bishopsgate bomb demonstrated how important it is to prepare for extended denial of access to your premises. But denial of access is not in the index, in contrast to social class and GOSPLAN.
The author lets us know that he disapproves, among other things, of Consultants, EIS Vendors, Finance Directors, HM Government, League Tables, Outsourcing, Systems Integrators, and Lady Thatcher. The book is intended to help the reader to benefit from the experience of others, but recounts almost none of that experience, and does not analyse what little is recounted. Nor does it make more than passing (and sceptical) reference to techniques such as risk analysis. The chapter on ethics (yes!) mentions Wessex RHA: it could be a valuable case study, if there were more information, or even a reference.
Disaster recovery planning ... is akin to the work of ... people preparing to take control of their own lives. Rather than ... “protect and survive” ... a more relevant precedent may be “protest and survive”, the approach of the Peace Movement, asking awkward questions of those purporting to lead the countries of which they are citizens. Get the flavour? And that is one of the book’s major conclusions, under the heading Practical Next Steps. But there are more confusions than conclusions. The table of contents alone is a disaster: the Bishopsgate bomb appears in the section on Fraud! The same three quotations appear under A Question of Scale (p67) and under People (p100). Every “only” is misplaced, witness [S]oftware reuse can only succeed as part of a ... planned ... process (p101: You bet it could fail, even then.) A list of ways to cause IT disasters is provided, all unevidenced and unargued, in the Introduction (where else?) These include: Ask the manager to define her objectives, and to identify the milestone stages that she will achieve en route to her goal. Pleading for trouble!
There are not many dilemmas in the Management Dilemmas chapter, which (like most chapters) is in large part not about IT disasters. But perhaps teachers are beginning, like their students, to use “dilemma” to mean problem, or quandary. Given a dilemma, however, the author usually manages to impale himself on both of its horns (no mean feat): Groupware facilitates the shift in information ethics, from the notion that information is power that needs to be withheld, to the understanding that shared information ... is empowerment (p107); yet information about planned redundancies in the hands of trade unions could prove disruptive (p8). Individual decision-making needs to be facilitated by organisational solidarity (p11); yet Whistle blowers may prevent disaster (p10). But then, managers need, we are told (p167), a mastery of language and of constructive ambiguity. Thus, to emphasise the importance of trusting ... IT systems ... is to misunderstand the ... grammar of trust (p24: perhaps unwise, but ungrammatical?) And, faced with a choice between A and B, there is likely to be a way of choosing both A and B (p23: “in vain” one would imagine).
The author has a way with metaphors, indeed prefers them to plain language, witness pivotal ... links (p14); layers of Sellotape become progressively weaker (p23); when different models ... are yoked together and supported ..., problems ... may arise at the interstices (p29). But perhaps he would be wiser to stick to the metaphors than to quote Professor Dijkstra at length and with approval (pp42-45) and add (p92) that to aspire to writing bug-free programs is unrealistic; or to state (p19) that [f]ibre optics can allow ... systems at ... original and back-up sites to be identical at all times (a task beyond copper wire?) or that [m]otivation for ... introduction of a ... virus is often the same as for ... fraud (monetary gain?) Viruses are discussed in terms so metaphorical (and venereal) that no mention is made of their being programs, or parts of programs, that cannot damage your system unless you run them. But, no doubt, this way with language is all part of the European cultural tradition that the approvingly quoted Cooley espouses, like having Wittgenstein’s Investigations and Grammar in the bibliography (but not cited), or misquoting and misinterpreting Shakespeare’s “more honoured in the breach” (p154).
At least the book has an attractive cover, showing a chain at the very moment a link snaps. (Metaphor: the chain is the reader's patience.) Like the author, we may ask but not answer the question (p114): What could Springer have done to prevent this ... disaster?
Copyright © 1995, 2001 Adrian Larner. The author asserts all moral rights.
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