Mind the infrastructure

In our mad rush to the future, it is too easy to become distracted by shiny new tech and ignore the stuff that we already have. Shiny and new is interesting, and the current stuff is boring.

E-mail is probably the most boring of our current systems. Like other utilities, it consistently does its job. It's there for us, all of the time.

Except when it isn't.

I've been working with a national staffing/placement/recruiting company. A big company, one with a name you would recognize.

And their e-mail system is broken.

Not completely broken, but definitely not whole. Their e-mail system has been rejecting messages for three days now. Not just messages from me, but from lots of people outside of their company. Some messages can get through, others cannot. In-bound messages are affected; outbound messages work as you would expect. Internal messages work. But not a good situation, especially in their line of business.

This firm has two problems. The first is that their e-mail system is broken. Like many other companies, they use e-mail for their normal work. With these problems, people must resort to alternative communication means: phone calls, voice mail, and fax. Data transfer is just about impossible, as their placement specialists have no skills with FTP or other data sharing technologies. The loss of e-mail has a significant affect on their business.

The second problem is a little more subtle: Their e-mail system has been broken for three days. Their system administrators are not able to resolve the problem.

Are you starting to worry yet? Here is a company that uses some old, boring tech to run their business. It breaks, and they cannot fix it. (Or they cannot fix it quickly.)

I don't believe that this company will go under because of an e-mail outage. But can any company afford to lose business in the current environment?

It's easy to see how this situation can happen. A company builds an infrastructure. The system works well, but requires expenditures to keep it running. Well-meaning budgeters reduce the allocation of resources. Maybe they lay off the technical lead, or assign him to other projects. Everything still works.

Until it doesn't.

Let's bring this closer to home: What infrastructure do you count on? How well is it supported? Have you cut back on the administration and support teams?

Now are you starting to worry?

Keep an eye on the infrastructure. Know what it is, and make sure that you have people who can keep it running.