Single Point of Failure

No Single point of failure…. My irritating (to my staff (previous and current) at least) mantra… so with the sick sense of humor I was born with I had a great laugh today! My great friend and former coworker Jack can attest that one of my favorite phrases concerning redundancy DR, BCM, BCP (basically all out disaster (been through too many of them not to learn my lessons well)) regarding everything (from physical infrastructure to knowledge transfer and management) is the “so what if I or so and so gets hit by a bus” this has a particular relevance to my current situation…
I arrive on Guam, am completely dumb founded that the current situation has little to NO redundancy, from people to hardware. I actually heard this explanation: “The guy that ran that system for 24 yrs died 6 months ago and we have never had a problem with it before now so we didn’t think to train anyone and we didn’t think he was going to up and die! No one else knows how to work it”!!!!!! OMG!!!! Heart palpitations! Had a guy leave for Korea and never did a knowledge transfer…Hey person X do you have the file on the X? Oh what’s his name was working on that, but he is now in Korea…I say “Does anyone know where his files are stored” they say “Oh they are on the c: drive of his laptop (not the file server mind you), I say “well can we get someone to pull them off for us?” They say “I’m not sure who to call” EYE Carumba! WOW did I get put into the dark ages. So I quickly started trying to put together a Business Continuity Plan for JUST my office in the knowledge arena with some serious pushback. I am trying desperately to explain to the staff that the current state is well “unacceptable” at best…..I use the scenario as always…”well what if so and so gets hit by a bus? Who is going to be able to pick up his process and run with it? The world is not going to stop and we most certainly are not going to stop”.
So the humor in all of this is the following (not the previous rant) is what I didn’t know in that briefing was…. There aren’t any public busses on Guam! Well ok they say there are but I have never in my 5 months here seen one! So I humor myself and get a little chuckle when I use that analogy about me getting hit by a bus…Knowing the statistical probability of that event occurring on Guam is about 0!
Until today! I almost had a heart attack I saw my first public bus on Guam!