Time for another Shark Tank
Shark Tank: That’s the one thing we were missing!
It’s the late 1990s, and this pilot fish working for an outsourcing outfit gets tasked with finding out what’s wrong with the company’s human resources system.
“The CIO and VP of HR request that I examine the current setup,” says fish. “It seems the HR employees are experiencing slow data access with periodic outages and want to know what can be done to improve the system.”
What fish finds is pretty grim: a pair of 5-year-old PCs in a user’s shared office, each outdated on patches and virus updates and equipped with only a Zip drive for data backups — which are rarely tested.
He sends his report to the CIO: “The current HR production system is ill equipped to provide its services for the long-term future productivity of the department. The equipment is rudimentary in its offerings: The hardware is no longer under manufacturer’s warranty. The operating system is no longer supported by its manufacturer or the OEM.
“The current configuration offers no redundancy or fail-over in case of hardware failure. The systems are located in an insecure environment and are freely accessible to anyone walking by the office.
“The systems are not on a regular schedule for updates regarding security patches and virus updates. The systems’ backup procedures don’t offer automated scheduling or full recoverability in case of system crash.
“And the HR application stores its data files in a proprietary format, and in the case of system failure, no one knows where the application install disks are located.”
The CIO forwards fish’s report to the VP of HR — and gets a prompt response: “I’ll have to get back to you. The HR application vendor just declared bankruptcy.”
