Scott McPherson's Web Presence

For those of us in the USA, the SARS almost-a-pandemic was just another headline. In Canada, especially Toronto, it became a nightmare.  And in Asia, it became a matter of life-and-death.  SARS came within a gnat's eyelash of becoming a real pandemic.  Remember your Pandemic 101:  A pandemic exists when a novel disease that has not previously been seen in humans emerges; it is easily transmissible from person to person; it is truly global geographically; and no or almost no natural immunity exists in the population. 

So the only thing that kept SARS from attaining that lofty goal was its inability to replicate itself on every continent and, as a result, to burn through a significant portion of each continent's population. There is an ongoing pandemic -- the HIV/AIDS pandemic - but people usually are not aware that yes, it is a pandemic virus.

Excepting AIDS, there is only one recent playbook on the shelf to fight this:  the SARS response.  One would do well to Google the hell out of SARS to gain knowledge about coronaviruses in general and how close we came to a real bad situation with SARS, which will help you better understand this new 2019-nCoV.

There is one other playbook on the shelf, or should be: your old, yellowed, dusty flu pandemic plan.  What, you say?  We have a pandemic plan?  Chances are your IT shop has, or had, one. Here in sunny Florida, CIOs were drilled by yours truly to have one until they cried for their mommas. And now it is time for CIOs, CTOs and assorted other IT professionals to find those plans, blow the dust off, refamiliarize themselves with them and vigorously update them.

In 2006, as I was formulating my own pandemic plans and convincing agency heads to do the same, Michael Dell flew in to Tallahassee to address agency IT leaders.  During Q and A, I asked Mr. Dell what his company's pandemic plans were.  His answer was quite informative.  He said they had first-hand experience with this topic during the SARS epidemic.  They checked their supply chains for vulnerabilities and deficiencies.  They prepared to eventually shift production between Ireland and China based on where the virus was, knowing flu moves in geographic and antigenic waves during a pandemic.  But it was the SARS response that would really inform the company's response.  It was inspiring.  But then Mr. Dell asked me what I thought of his plan, and did I have suggestions?

Well yeah, I thought, but simply told him it appeared he had a good handle on things.

For those of you with pandemic plans, you will probably find the human elaments have not changed much.  Will you engage work-at-home plans?  What defines WORK, anyway?  What are your deliverables in a socially distanced environment?  I can tell you we have already addressed these issues in my shop and are preparing to test all ways to access our servers and network and VoIP servers.  Can our support staff answer calls from home successfully?  Can they work on their laptops and access our help desk software? Can our developers code from home successfully? 

Have you adjusted your skills matrix recently? Have you mapped all the tasks an employee performs, and are two to three people able to also perform those tasks?  It doesn't mean another person does 100% of those tasks.  Quite the opposite: It means you can distribute those tasks across your area so that the work gets done adequately.  For flu, we assumed an absentee rate approaching 35-40% at any given time as the virus burns through your community.  For this coronavirus, that may be conservative.  Or not.  We don't know yet.  And you don't know who might never come back.

Now for the supply chain.  Apple just announced it was implementing plans to deal with supply chain disruptions caued by the pandemic.  You should also lump your SaaS and cloud providers into that category.  You should be surveying all your key suppliers and asking them what their pandemic plans are.  If they cannot articulate their pandemic plans, find alternative suppliers. Ditto your cloud partners.  What are their pandemic plans?  After all, the cloud is just a whole bunch of data centers, full of people, packed into spaces with sealed HVAC systems.

You need to be asking those questions TOMORROW. You should expect answers the same day.  There is no reason to delay doing these things. It is the prudent thing to do.