Pete Seeger penned those magic words back in 1961. They made some money for him and a lot of money and fame for Peter, Paul & Mary … but even though the song’s been around longer than many of today’s business IT execs have ever listened. Just look at yesterday’s news:
Close to 300 flights were delayed or canceled Wednesday after United’s flight operations computer system Unimatic, which supplies information to pilots, shut down from approximately 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. CDT.
Chief Operating Officer Pete McDonald said the error occurred during routine system testing.
“Yesterday, an employee made a mistake and caused the failure of both Unimatic and our backup system,” he said in the recorded call to employees. He did not elaborate on the error. …source here:
Well, I’ll elaborate on the error … of course I don’t get paid millions per year to drive a company into bankruptcy and cheat the employees, but I have been keeping computer systems and other ops-critical equipment running for nearly 40 years.
People have this annoying but inescapable trait. We make mistakes. We can browbeat employees, we can spend a fortune training them, we can hang posters that say “caution” and we can fire them, after the fact (bet the guy or gal McDonald was talking about is already sending out resumes) but the errors will still happen. Or, as we used the say in Space Command, “anomalies occur”.
Mission critical systems simply must be designed so that one person does not have access to everything. You can buy redundancy out the ying-yang but if you let the same worker hold the passwords or keys to both systems, shit … and I do characterize United’s business security methods as pure shit, amply demonstrated here …WILL happen.
This incident was 100% preventable at virtually no cost at all … except the seemingly insurmountable cost of forethought. Or so think I.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Darkness of the Clueless Mind, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
Well there is no need to understand the techno-geek aspects, Daniel. My point … which I probably used too many words to try to make … is that the sooner we stop accepting failures and allowing failures to happen by not taking simple procedures … such as not letting one employee have access to both the main and the backup databases, the sooner we could all profit.