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Crisis Management and Data - Do You Have a Plan?

March 18, 2008

Recently, I attended a sales and marketing luncheon put on by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. The topic was crisis management. It was a very good presentation featuring speakers from GameDay Communications and P&G. They spoke mostly about traditional disasters, and how to deal with them - offering some great tips for managing a crisis. First was “have a plan.” What will you and your team do if a crisis emerges. This got me thinking about what we do here at LUCRUM and how “crisis” has evolved in the digital age. What would happen if you have a “digital” crisis list this one from today’s Wall Street Journal:

Grocery-store chains Hannaford Bros. and Sweetbay, both owned by Belgium’s Delhaize Group SA, reported a credit-card data breach, exposing 4.2 million cards to potential fraudulent charges.

Stories like this don’t conjure up the vivid imagery associated with more traditional crisis situations (hostages, plane crashes, robbery, injury), and as a result they often go overlooked. None the less, they can destroy people’s lives and companies reputations forever. In this digital age, with companies having more and more data about customers and citizens on file, having a plan for how to deal with this type of potential crisis is critical. Will your company offer credit restoration services to clients? Will you bring this to the attention of the media? Will you go beyond that to take measures to stop repeat events from occuring? Will you do something to salvage your customer relationships?

Even more critical than having a plan for what you do after this happens is is the idea of having a plan to keep this from happening at all. What are you doing to secure your data? What is your plan?  An ounce of prevention…

Free Preview - WSJ.com

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Written by DAVIDeBOWMAN · Filed Under Information Technology 

Comments

2 Responses to “Crisis Management and Data - Do You Have a Plan?”

  1. Scott Felten on March 19th, 2008 8:31 am

    Adding to your comments, I’d suggest that when engaging the business, we (IT) avoid the term disaster recovery. Yes, disasters happen but you know what…they always happen elsewhere - at least that is the perception of the business. I found it more helpful to speak in terms of real examples using plain English. For example, “Did you hear about Hannaford? I was thinking if that happened to us, we would only be able to do {insert 90 second DR elevator pitch) and what we really need to be able to do is {insert 90 second DR v2.0 elevator pitch} because we need to ensure that {insert value proposition}. How about I take the next step on this, put some high level things together and we can get together for lunch and make sure we are doing the best we can do.”

    I think the term ‘Diaster Recovery’ to the business is not much different than that evil term of old ‘Edit Config.sys’. IT must speak the same language as the business else we are reduced to hand signals and SHOUTING. :)

  2. Nick Wright on March 19th, 2008 11:30 am

    Scott, I like that quote: “… we are reduced to hand signals and SHOUTING.”

    I used to work in advertising… and technical talk was alien to me. But now I work in a technical company, and have saturated my mind with technical terms. Often I have to remind myself to speak my clients’ language so they can grasp what I’m talking about… or else I’ll never make a sale.

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