jim.drewe (12/11/2013)

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Eric ... I would heartily agree. Unfortunately, executives in publicly held companies listen to Wall Street, not the common sense from subordinates. If Wall Street says a particular metric is too low (or too high), the CEO sets the goals and barks out orders. You might at the higher levels get to ask questions for clarification, but you generally don't get to challenge the decision (I mean, you can, but that will last as long as you stepping in front of a train).

What it will take is for a calamity of the highest order to hit a major corporation before the investment bankers will include it on their checklist. Just as I used DR as an example in my previous post, there are plenty of companies which did not survive the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (the prelude to the 9-11 attack). Law enforcement wouldn't let people back in to their offices and there some small firms went out of business as a result of having no DR plan. After that, DR became a big deal and DR validation tests were mandated in many companies. After 9-11, some firms still were hit hard with poor DR planning. This same financial services company I worked for at time (located in lower Manhattan) went into insanity mode because of all the non-IT business departments in a location near Ground Zero had their own SQL Server database systems. They had offsite backup tapes, but no real DR plan. The insanity lasted for about a month restoring SQL Server databases (that we in IT didn't manage) in alternative locations.

Would top management have eventually seen the light without these disasters? Yeah, eventually, but not with the same urgency or sense of need. But to go back to your comment, I would agree that there are some IT functions that are too critical to outsource.

What it will take is for a calamity of the highest order to hit a major corporation before the investment bankers will include it on their checklist. Just as I used DR as an example in my previous post, there are plenty of companies which did not survive the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (the prelude to the 9-11 attack).