A relationship with a vendor can take many forms, ranging from a sales driven vendor/client adversarial relationship to a collaborative partnership. ...
... We did not have a robust communication plan for responding to a total network collapse. Email, web-based paging, portals, and anything that used the data network for communication was down. Voice mail broadcasts using our PBX and regular phones (not IP phones) turned out to save the day. ...
... I was risk averse and did not want to replace the leadership of the network team for fear that terminating our single point of human failure would result in an outage. The price of keeping the leadership in place was a worse outage. I should have acted sooner to bolster leadership of the team."
It must have been very difficult to write this and put it out in the public sphere. However, it's an eye-opening and refreshing account, and even reassuring -- Halamka has clearly learned from this incident and has made changes as a result.
Tomorrow, the Industry Standard will have a special feature further describing Halamka and his transformation from old-school "geek doctor" to a modern technology executive plugged into the worlds of Web 2.0 and virtual work. In the meantime, the lessons offered by Halamka's blog are clear: Senior executives can be given the mandate to be transparent about their operations, strategies, and even their mistakes. It may seem counterintuitive, but it can boost professional and company profiles, and help offset some of the inevitable burn brought on by the Web's open secrets mill.
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