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There are likely many lessons for higher ed from this past weekend’s computer outage that caused British Airways to shut down operations.
Here are 3:
Lesson 1: Technology Will Fail
Lesson 2: Technology Failures Can Have Much Bigger Impacts Than Expected
Lesson 3: We Will Forget Lessons 1 and 2
Higher ed leaders should be looking at the British Airways experience and thinking "there but for the grace of God go I."
It will be fascinating to learn what really happened at British Airways that caused its technology to fail - and how this failure grounded almost all operations. The CEO, Alex Cruz, has blamed the outage on a “power surge”. Critics of Cruz point out that in the past year he outsourced IT operations to India, in the process of laying off 700 technology professionals in the UK.
The financial impact to British Airways of this technology meltdown are not yet known. A similar technology outage in 2016 cost Delta a reported $100 million in lost revenue.
If I were the president or provost (or whoever the CIO reports to), and I was reading about British Airways over the long weekend, I’d come back to campus on Tuesday asking the following questions:
1 - What is the worst case scenario of regular institution operations that could possibly be disrupted by a technology outage?
2 - How much would it cost the institution in terms of direct and indirect costs if operations had to cease due to a technology outage?
3 - What are is the probability range that this sort of catastrophic technology outage could occur, and what methodology was used to calculated these probabilities?
4 - What would the immediate and ongoing cost be to ensure confidence in the resiliency of campus systems, such that if such an outage would occur that recovery would be possible?
5 - What has been done, and what else can be done, in terms of running disaster recovery testing events to measure and improve operational resilience?
At some point, those in charge of those in charge of campus IT need to understand that technology failure is normal. It will happen.
We can try to reduce and eliminate catastrophic tech failures as much as possible. But technology failures will never be completely eliminated.
The key, therefore, is planning (and practicing) for recovery.
This is easy advice to give, and difficult advice to implement. Made more difficult by both the dependence of every college and university on outside technology vendors for critical campus systems, and the move towards cloud based technologies.
The fact that higher ed is moving from providing to consuming IT services should increase, not decrease, the amount of energy (and resources) spent on resiliency.
What are the most consequential technology meltdowns that you’ve witnessed at your institution?
What would you say the higher ed lessons that we should be learning from British Airways?
