What to do when you show up for work and your building is gone.

Today's ITMA discussion was about Disaster Recovery.  What to do if your building disappears one day.  Oddly enough, as many people as I've asked in the past couple weeks, almost no one had a formal written plan.  Everyone is doing something, specifically regarding backups and getting the servers backup up and running. But very little else such as finding a facility, ordering desks, pens, making payroll, paying vendors, collecting revenue etc.

We started the discussion by reviewing what we are doing at DMLO.  After realizing we only had half a plan (the IT side) we decided to re-write our entire plan.  Here is a brief description or our process and some ideas that came up during our meeting.

1.  Make some assumptions and plan on adjusting as the need arises.  No plan can encompass all scenarios. We assumed we had 7 days to get some critical services functioning.  We also assumed the disaster will only impact DMLO and not the community at large.  Community wide disaster would have a much different priority list.  Vendor impact will play a significant part in how long it will take to implement the plan.  We will adjust as needed.

2.  Written  document consists of:

             Responsibility list (Bob - Tech, Kellie - Banking, AP/AR, insurance etc, Ruth - staff contacts, Directors-A list client contact info etc.)

             Disaster Recover Team contact info and plan implementation procedures.  "How do we get started".

             Contact lists (multiple list depending on areas covered).  My list contains the contacts I need to get equipment and the data accessible, other lists are other contacts.

3.  Written document is distributed to all directors/partners and they are instructed to store it in their homes or other safe location away from the office.  It won't do anyone any good if it's in your desk drawer.

4.  Other documents stored off-site (usb stick, dropbox etc) but not part of the DR document consists of procedures (backup restore, remotely change voice message system, other IT procedures) software license keys and vendor info, notes and implementation procedures etc that might be needed.  Even seemingly simple procedures (how to change your voicemail and swapping out the tapes in the tape drive as examples) are documented and outlined.  This will save time and help keep people calm.

Some issues we are still working on is how to we get our main phone number rerouted,  what is our priority list for applications and network services (what needs to come backup first), contacts info for tech firms that could host our servers and provide basic infrastructure (electrical, AC and Internet connectivity), initial first steps in launching the plan (what triggers the plan, who sets up initial meeting etc.) and of course testing.  How do you test your plan effectively without actually causing a disaster? 

Interesting enough, no one at today's meeting had any budget for implementing a DR plan.  The investment in a cold, warm or hot site seems to high for most firms to incure.  Difficult to ask for funds to invest in something you hope will never happen.
Feel free to add your comment or post questions.  Anyone wishing to see our final document please email me at bdaugherty@dmlo.com and I will send you a copy (soon as it's complete....or as close to complete as we're going to get it).

May 18th Meeting - What would you do if you showed up for work and your building was completely gone?

The May meeting will be a discussion about Diaster Recover / Business Continuity.

Roundtable Discussion on Disaster Recovery

Were you at the meeting last year when the library made their presentation on what it took to recover from the flood?  Did you make any changes to the way you operate after that time? 

You don’t have to wait until your firm comes up with an officially documented Disaster Recovery plan to think about what you can do “just in case.”  Start small but start.

And then at the other end of the spectrum are those firms with formal plans.  Maybe you are even considering cold or hot sites.

And then many of us are in between.  Where ever you are in your thought process, planning or execution there is always room for improvement.  Join us on May 18 at 11:45 as we discuss Disaster Recovery.

We will be meeting on May 18^th (Wednesday) at the offices of McCauley Nicolas & Company.  They are located at 702 North Shore Drive, Suite 500, Jeffersonville, IN.  Visit their web site at  www.mnccpa.com for directions.  The meeting will start at 11:45.

Please email James_Osborne@mnccpa.com.  if you can attend.  Hope to see you there.

Melanie Bunger
http://itma-kyanna.blogspot.com/

Selecting the Right Software - April meeting

Making a software change in your firm or recommending a change to a client can be a tricky process.  If you’ve ever done this and who hasn’t, you know all you ever hear is what didn’t work, what they didn’t like or what wasn’t like the old program. 

Michael Drury from Oasis (www.oasisky.com)  specializes in helping clients choose the right accounting application.  But whether it’s a new accounting application, time and billing or scheduling software making the right decision is critical.  Michael will guide us through the process of researching, evaluating and helping your firm or client make the right choice, a choice everyone will be happy with.  
 
We will be meeting at 11:45am on Thursday April 21^st at the offices of DMLO at 9300 Shelbyville Road, Suite 1100, Louisville, KY 40222.  Please email bdaugherty@dmlo.com if you can attend. 

March Meeting Summary.

The March meeting topic was Research.  Interesting to see that most of us are on the same page as far as what magazines we read, e-newsletters we get etc.

Some of our favorite magazines were; PCWorld, Redmond Magazine, Disaster Recovery Journal and Accounting Today and The CPA Technology Advisor for those of us in CPA firms.  Some of these magazines are free.  Check them out.

We’re all getting a ton of e-newsletters.  Few RSS feeds but TechWire and Helpnet Security are probably worth getting.

LinkedIn groups we discussed were the CCH, a Wolters Kluwer Business Group, VMWare Group, Boomer Consulting, Inc. Group and several accounting groups.  LinkedIn groups are a great place to ask your peers questions. Several of us had posted questions and got good responses.  Including myself.  Interesting enough I had recently posted a question to the CCH group and 2 days later, a CCH Tech support rep called me and asked if I needed help with my issue, even though I had not placed a service call about the issue.  A little "big brother" but kind of cool to see they monitor that group and are being proactive.

Blogs we’re following were mostly accounting related, but probably good info for all of us.  Check out these;  Accountingweb, Rita Keller-Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders and Mark Russinovich’s tech blog (he also wrote a very good book,  called Zero Day, I finished it in 2 sittings).  All of these can be found with a Google search.

Everyone in the group is an avid Googled  search fan.  Though Jason Thompson (McCauley Nicolas) stated that many of the linked related to the disasters in Japan had viruses attached to them.  As always be careful.  Other popular sites for problem resolution, of course were support.microsoft.com and expert-exchange.com.

Twitter seemed the least used by the group, but we all agreed we're going to have to adapt to using it soon.  Or at least start following a few of the more important and knowledgable people in our areas.  I personally follow Jason Hiner and other Tech Republic staff as well as Roman Kepczyk, Rita Keller and Gary Boomer as leaders in the accounting field.

We also discussed the need to watch what is being said about our firms both on Twitter and Facebook.  While none of us have any practical experience yet, we did discuss that there are various tools to automate the search of both Twitter and Facebook for key words such as your firm name.  If you have experience with any of these, please post a comment and let us know what you think.

If I’ve missed any or you have any other good resources, please post a comment.

Welcome Vendors

The ITMA would like to welcome vendors to join our group.  However, we would like to set some guidelines to everyone's benefit.

If you're a tech related vendor and would like to join our group, get meeting notices and attend any of our meetings we'd be happy to have you.  Simply sign up on our ITMA_KYanna Yahoo group to be put on our list.  http://groups.yahoo.com/

We do ask that you respect our members and not simply make this a sales opportunity.  Our goal is to share information among our members and assist them in doing their jobs.  Obviously, as technology vendors you have much of the information and expertise we're looking for and we greatly appreciate the info you bring to our group.  And we are often in the market to purchase equipment and services.  So, hopefully this will work to our mutual benefit.

March Meeting Topic - Research

Our group discussion for the March meeting will be on research.  What magazines do you read? What web sites and/or blogs do you read?  Do you belong to any LinkedIn groups, follow anyone on Twitter? Have any cool news apps etc.?

We all Google, but what other tools are you using to keep up with the mountains of information our end users and bosses expect us to know off the top of our heads?

We will also have a short business meeting to decide the vendors as members question.

We will be meeting on March 17th (Thursday) at the offices of McCauley Nicolas & Company.  They are located at 702 North Shore Drive, Suite 500, Jeffersonville, IN.  Visit their web site at  http://www.mnccpa.com/ for directions.  The meeting will start at 11:45.

Please email James_Osborne@MNCCPA.com if you can attend.  Hope to see you there.

To Vendor or Not to Vendor.... That is the Question

Should we allow vendors (salespeople) to be members of our group and attend meetings?

Pro:  Since our group is fairly small and we rely on vendors for many of our presentation the advantage is that we build better relationships and our membership gets larger.  We  also have access to more information and vendors may have insight and/or perspectives we hadn't considered.

Con:  Since some of our questions to each other are about vendors, it might infringe on "free discussion" about those vendors.  No one wants to bad mouth a company while they're in the room.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.