And yes, the right people are critical. The mission-critical style of building systems is something which comes from having been trained a certain way — and from focusing on the desired result in terms of reliability (uptime requirement) and working backwards from there.

I was particularly annoyed with one employee who, when being shown how to “follow procedure” to achieve best-practice security and reliability, would always resist. The system was back online, problem solved — why “waste time” going through the checklist?

@Zern: The odd one to me is always that costs must be reduced. In some business situations that might be true. In others, it might be appropriate to increase spending. Once the business infrastructure has been provided, and is supporting the staff and systems to make $X profit, maybe X can be doubled with only a little extra spending because base costs are already covered and economies of scale kick in.

In fairness, though, you also need the right people doing it. At another law firm a similar size to mine, they have periods of up to three days once or twice every year where the computers are taken down for ‘maintenance.’ They seem to accept that as the usual thing! Perhaps it is, but not on my watch.

I regard IT as an integral part of my business, and without computers for three days, I might as well shut the doors and send all the admin staff home, and divert the phone to a message service!!! My IT is managed by someone who has a background in ‘mission critical’ systems — airlines, hospitals, etc.

My ‘new’ network at work has just had its second birthday. Not a single hour of downtime in that two years, because it was planned properly and is well supported.

Now in the great scheme of things it is a small job — Server and ten PCs that run XP, Word, Outlook, Firefox, and little else, with two users using MYOB.

BUT, the planning means that:

1. XP was implemented with roaming profiles, and all data (including ‘My Documents’ for each user) is stored on the server
2. XP, instead of having all of its useless bloated features, was configured to look and feel like the Win98 environment it replaced (increasing PC performance and reducing training time)
3. All the Word templates are centrally stored and managed with master templates (containing Universal data like return address and the Christmas Holiday message)
4. Outlook syncs with five Palm OS handhelds that all sync the same calendar and address book, but each users own email and to-do lists.

My staff went home one Friday night and came in Monday morning to find a whole new system that required them to make almost no adjustments — file locations, custom Word Toolbar items, custom Print dialog boxes, Court diary and interview room bookings all seemed very familiar to them.

Most of them of course have no idea how much tweaking and testing went into making it so seamless!