Disaster recovery preparedness through continuous process optimization

When the news of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon came in on September 11, 2001, Lucent Technologies program managers for each of the major telecom customers in the New York/Washington, D.C., area were in contact, beginning the arduous process of support and recovery for one of the worst disasters in the history of the world. The advanced disaster recovery planning that had been put in place for such an unthinkable event gave the customer emergency center teams, led by a certified program management staff, a map to guide them through the days ahead. Subsequently, that map has been expanded. Added to it are brand-new avenues of preparedness that were inconceivable at the time the original planning took place. This paper describes the planning, execution, and feedback stages of a disaster recovery process. A case study from the September 11 events will be used to demonstrate how Lucent, having planned a cohesive disaster recovery strategy, executed upon the plan to quickly and effectively respond to, restore, and repair network damage. Finally, the paper discusses the last step in the disaster recovery process, which is the communication or feedback on what was learned from the experience, and the impact the learnings had on the current processes, culture, and organizational model.