One day ended and another began. Kathryn had a morning meeting with some of the upper management types at her firm and actually had the gumption to mention that they should begin partnering with an off-shore firm or two in South Korea and in Russia. China was already being priced out of the market with Wal-Mart and other companies setting up factory towns. The influx of cash had Chinese companies and the various Chinese mobs snatching up IT workers as fast as they could be found. There were still places in Russia and Poland where college education was almost as high as the poverty and land was cheap.
The first reaction from some of the management had been they didn't have the Indian operation turning a profit yet. Other companies had tried going the Russian route and failed. Kathryn responded that off-shoring wasn't being marketed then, so it was unfair to judge by that history. Then you had a major uphill battle to sell off-shoring. Now all you had to do was be cheap.
Perhaps it was the fact she had overslept. Perhaps it was the fact she was now going to be making more money than some in this room. Maybe it was simply because she had to deal with the coffee from the cafeteria this morning instead of her usual $9 quart of heaven, due to oversleeping. Kathryn pulled out the documentation showing the epidemic rate of AIDS at the brothels. Then she went into the story that most of the single male IT workers spent their extra cash in the Red Light District. Finally, she dropped the bomb that she suspected several of the male 20-somethings they had sent over to India had visited the brothels near their campus.
People were getting irate with her while she went into her oratory. The men assumed this was a severe case of PMS and began doodling on their legal pads, trying to make it look like they were taking notes. You could have heard a pin drop after she dropped the last bomb though. Every man in there knew those horny jocks they had hired were swimming in whatever pool they could find. They all knew that the “sex for sale” marketing tactic would be decimated if it ever got out that one or more of their barely old enough to shave crowd went public with AIDS, not to mention the cost of their insurance plan.
Kathryn sat there drinking her nasty coffee from downstairs and let that bomb burn its way through their brains. Finally one of the married guys with absolutely no skills piped up that this was an event horizon they had to consider. Another volunteered that he had two clients with locations already in Russia, so could probably pump them for some information about IT skills in the area near them. One more said they had a manufacturing client in South Korea already and he would make some inquiries there as well. Finally it was determined that they would quietly investigate building operations in all three of the countries Kathryn had mentioned. Even if they didn't lose their entire IT staff every few years in India, the resulting talent drain would push salaries up to the point it was cheaper to do the work in the U.S.
The morning meeting ran long, but ended in time for her to check email and round up the troops for their lunch presentation. She wasn't sure why, but she decided to use the guys who had been to India in this meeting. It made sense given that they had just gotten back from there, but she doubted Margret was dumb enough to get turned on once she found out that horny bunch had been to a country with legal brothels and little in the way of health care or prevention.
Margret arrived right on time. Lunch was just being set out in the conference room and they all stuffed themselves while chit-chatting about quasi-work-related things. The guys had strategically placed themselves around Margret as they had been trained to do and the girls fawned over getting lunch allowing glimpses and brushes. Kathryn still wasn't sure which way Margret's door swung, or if she even had a door. It was difficult to tell.
One thing which she made mental note of was Margret's prodding to find out who had ventured outside of the campus in Bangalore. Those who admitted to having gone out at all she suddenly had little interest in. The woman wasn't stupid, thought Kathryn. Lunch allowed for the team to provide glowing reports about how the backups had been installed and how well Margret's people worked with them during the process. No real details, but few were needed. Margret had already talked with the systems managers who had done the testing. This was just a little time for mutual appreciation and bonding.
With lunch over, the team began showing off the PowerPoint presentation they had put together with a timeline for the migration of the first two data centers. It was going to happen on the following weekend. They kept pointing out the massive bandwidth connection which was set up just to do the final data migration. Margret's own people had written the software that would do the extract of final data changes, then copy it across the network and load it onto the new system. The same software could be run in reverse if a back out was needed. All in the room assured her it would not be necessary, but that it didn't hurt to have a Plan B.
It was obvious to Margret she was being coddled to keep this golden cow putting out golden milk. She was outright pissed that the only guys provided her had been to an AIDS-infested area and she was certain none of them were smart enough to avoid catching it. Her summation of the girls in the room told her three of the five were too stupid to care. In short, this team would soon be moving on in one way or another.
Since Kathryn had chosen to treat her this way, like a napkin at McDonald's instead of the full-table setting at a nice place, she decided to drop a bomb on them and ruin their week. “This migration to off-shore is all well and good, but you seem to have overlooked a serious recovery issue,” she said. All of the younglings leapt to inform her that the data centers were designed to split load and fail over just like the existing centers. They also professed to having witnessed the fail over testing themselves.
Kathryn finally chimed in saying she assured her they had tried to think of everything, but wanted to hear her concern so it could be addressed.
“Well,” started Margret, “Every night we do incremental backups and every morning, the prior night's backups are sent to Iron Mountain for storage. The media return in such a manner that we have two full weeks of incremental backups. We also perform weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual backups. Each of those backups goes off to Iron Mountain as soon as it is completed. There is a set of rules in place so we have at least the last three sets of each off-site in secure storage. I don't see anywhere in this plan where we have included the round trip shipping cost of backup media, nor the turn around time it would take to have the media flown to India and do a full restoration in the event of a disaster.”
The only sound in the room was that of the ventilation system when Margret finished speaking. Margret looked Kathryn directly in the eye and waited for a response. She knew there wasn't one, but wanted to see the tap dance. After waiting for a minute while Kathryn began looking through some documentation saying she was sure they had it covered and others sputtering assurances, Margret dropped her other bomb.
“In order to qualify for FDIC insurance, we cannot have a recovery period which is longer than 12 hours. The flight from the closest coast to India is over 14 hours, and that doesn't include restoration or testing time.”
Nothing like hitting someone with the 2x4 of a federal regulation right between the eyes after you've eaten their food, thought Margret.
Kathryn made a mental note to never offer Margret tainted nookie again when trying to coddle her. This girl didn't play slow pitch or croquet, she was fast-pitch hardball all the way. The “barely old enough to shave” crowd was no help to her now. Time to cry uncle.
“I'm sure we addressed this issue at a high level, but now that the project is moving forward, perhaps we need to get into more detail and ensure there will be no problems going forward,” said Kathryn with a slight emphasis on “going forward.” If you are free this evening I would like to schedule a meeting with yourself and our Data Storage & Recovery Team.
Margret was pretty certain that “team” was going to be formed about five minutes after this meeting got over, but she responded saying that she would have to check her calendar once back in the offic
e. They would not be able to get into too much detail without Margret bringing in her existing systems managers because they would have to sign off on any BRP (business recovery plan) put into place.
There was a special spring to Margret's step when she left Big Four Consulting that day. She knew very well that she had no plans tonight other than staying late to get caught up on some paperwork. Had Kathryn bothered to do any of her own research when putting the plan together, she would have been able to shoot Margret out of the saddle. Yes, there was a rule claiming you couldn't have outages and a catastrophic event had to be recovered from inside of 12 hours, but as long as your secondary data center could handle the full business load you had quite a bit of time to get your primary data center restored. Margret simply wanted the same four-star treatment upper management got.
***
Nedim had not heard from John since he sent the fax. In an odd way they had been best friends. The past three weeks had been mentally grueling for Nedim. His cousin and his friend were still living with him. Umar, who was using the cover of being his cousin from Saudi Arabia, had even joined his mosque and gotten invited into the private discussions on the Holy Quran with Nedim's cleric. The only time he was actually “free” of them was when he went to work. He dared not attempt to contact John again, but he really needed to know John had gotten away. Nedim was certain he would not live long enough to see John again.
A heightened interest in the email exchanges from a pair of addresses had Nedim worried. He could tell from the content of the messages that something was going to happen soon. He had even tried to not translate all of the messages. Soon, the men stopped asking him for translations, they just had him printing out the results. While they still had some things copied off to CD, most of the messages were simply translated and printed. He had been printing enough that his printer was starting to have issues.
That's it!
He still had the support contract with the company where John worked. Both of his “roommates” had even complained about his printer acting up recently. John was in charge of his account. He could log a ticket with them and see who responded. If the response didn't come from John, he would at least know he had gotten away.
Nedim returned home after work and began his ritual of processing email. When it came time to print, his printer started acting up right on cue. Both roommates complained. Nedim opened up the file containing his support contract information and went to the Web site. After keying in his customer ID and password he was allowed to enter a new trouble ticket. He ran the applet which gathered all of the information about his system configuration and driver versions and attached the file to the trouble ticket. He informed his roommates that if the problem was in the driver or other software he had, he would have a fix before tomorrow.
Ramesh made a note to have the team purchase another printer. Once a cheap ink jet printer started having problems, they tended to go straight to Hell. This printer was a Brother printer; the absolute bottom of the industry. Ramesh was surprised it had lasted the past three weeks, let alone however long Nedim had been using it. One thing was certain in Ramesh's mind: Products with the Brother name plate were condoms - Use once and dispose of properly.
***
Kent sat in a very fine restaurant in Paris. The IT workers in this location were giving him the royal treatment trying to hang onto their jobs. Given that some of the board members liked to vacation in France, Kent had put this data center as the last one on the list before the central two. The bank was still going to have to keep some kind of offices here so board members could take “business trips” to France. These trips always coincided with the start of their vacations, but thankfully neither the shareholders nor the IRS had called them on it.
Prior to lunch, Kent had asked each of the department heads to come up with a migration plan for this division of the bank to use the existing bank system rather than the one their bank currently used. The deadline for them to get it to him was Friday. They had complained that all of the work currently being done in the existing system wouldn't allow them time to prepare such a migration plan. Kent told them to stop all work on the system and to begin mapping the data for load into First Global Bank's existing system.
What Kent didn't know was they had already done this work a year ago at Margret's request. They had a list of business rules that must be added to First Global Bank's system before it could be used, but the bulk of the data mapping was already in place. They would have to spend less than a day on updating it. In effect, Kent had given them the rest of the week off when he put in writing no further work was to occur on the system they supported. Most spent the rest of the day updating their resumes and talking with family on the phone. Nobody there was stupid enough to believe they still had a job.
Kent's real reason for going on this trip was to get everyone putting together a plan to migrate their systems into the primary system used by the original bank. He was visiting the data centers in reverse migration order so if the migration project came in late, he would be able to pitch the “world view” project to the board as the natural completion. Kent hadn't bothered to read any of the documentation Margret had emailed him prior to contracting with Big Four Consulting to do the data center migrations. If he had, the data center migration project wouldn't be happening at all.
Now he sat in a very fine restaurant drinking very fine wine and eating very fine food. Only the heads of this bank division were at the table, and they were sparing no expense. They all knew Kent presented projects to the board. Everyone at the table was wondering just how long they were going to have a job. They were only too happy to agree when he said they had to schedule a training session on how to use the main system for First Global Bank. He told them to contact Margret and obtain a pair of trainers from her. All of their employees needed to be trained by the end of next month. Kent had no idea if the system could be cut over in that time frame, but he intended to make them fear for their livelihoods. There were several other sites Kent wanted to see in France before moving onto the next location and he didn't expect to pay a dime to see them.
Tactically, it would have made more sense to have had this location migrated first. It had the highest cost of operation in the company. Because of the lax work attitude in France, they had twice the operations and programming staff of any division. Payroll and other worker-related taxes paid here by the bank were astronomical. If they really could simply cut over, Kent would be able to eliminate all but one IT person here and sell off all of the computer equipment along with the building the data center was in. Real estate prices had risen in this area and they could ask a premium for a fully equipped data center.
Kent assigned the task of getting the data center up for sale to the VP in charge of business real estate mortgages. The head of IT simply looked at his plate like it was his last meal. Kent saw this out of the corner of his eye and got an erection from the power rush. He then changed the conversation to what sounded like small talk, dropping in hints of what he wanted to see before leaving. Every VP at the table, except the VP of IT, volunteered to take him as their guest. Ahhh ... It's good to be King! Kent thought.
***
Nikolaus was sitting at his desk going over reports on freezer construction and existing freezer utilization when his phone rang. The voice on the other end told him the interrogators were finished with the two occupants of the first camp. As instructed, the person calling Nikolaus informed the interrogators they could just go home and everything would be handled. Nikolaus told the caller to transfer the prisoners.
As soon as he hung up the phone, Nikolaus picked up a disposable cell phone and called a special number. When they answered and exchanged pass phrases, Nikolaus told them to assemble the teams, there was a transfer in progress.
Then You Find a Hill
Kathryn sat in the main conference room for this location of Big Four Consulting. This time, she wasn't the one pitching, but the one being sold. Well, sold wasn't exactl
y it. A vendor was launching a new project and had just opened up the marketing war chest. Big Four Consulting was being paid to sell this product, so a more accurate statement would be Kathryn was being instructed on what she was to sell.
Pytho Corporation had just expanded its ERP product into a complete banking product. They weren't happy with having the world's most unreliable, yet best-selling database, they wanted more. Every Big Four Consulting account manager in the room was being given a box of CDs containing PowerPoint slides and marketing PDF files on how to sell this product. The heads of sales were handing out their cards and shaking hands. They paid very special attention to the three people on the other side of the room as those three people came from the Langston Group.
Kathryn had to laugh at the phrase “industry analyst.” These people analyzed nothing. They were all given a folder with a printed document and a CD with a Word file of the same document. The document was a marketing article carefully written to sound like an analyst report. Margret knew that the English majors working at Big Four Consulting had spent about a week writing that article, but when it appeared in the Langston Group's private newsletter it was going to have only these three listed in the byline.
The industry had turned a blind eye to the incestuous relationship that spawned its leaders these days. Now that management had taken over the IT world, the leaders were pretty much a result of inbreeding just like other areas of management. It really was a self-sustaining machine.
“Industry analyst” groups would only provide their insight to IT leaders whose companies not only subscribed to their service, but promised to follow their advice. In return, IT leaders found themselves featured in industry trade rags any time they implemented something the analysts claimed was cutting edge. This allowed the IT leaders to be covertly marketed to other companies who wanted to obtain great IT leaders.
Infinite Exposure Page 8
