Saturday, July 21, 2007

Unbelievable

Last month I wrote about a cyclone in Oman and the one thing that struck me after the event was the lack of preparedness everywhere. I think the worst hit was the Royal Oman Police. I guess they has their data center in the middle of the floodplain where some of the worst damage happened and because of this they lost all their main servers. They clearly had no business continuity plan (BCP) and no disaster recovery (DRP) in place and did not think of a scenario of 3 feet water in the main server room.

Until the cyclone, Oman looked like leaping into the twentyfirst century with their advanced goverment IT integrating the civil administrations of people, immigration, drivers licenses, work permits, car registration, etc. etc. I was amazed by the advanced way in which the data was integrated (e.g. my drivers license number was the same as my number of my id card which allowed me to work in the country, and my car was linked to my drivers license - and therefore also the traffic offences ...). This clearly added a lot to the efficiency of the country, but the bottleneck was the data center in the middle of a wadi.

After the cyclone I could not export my car (since it was not known if there were traffic offences still outstanding), immigration moved back to a paper based system and all kinds of other services grinded to a halt. Luckily Oman is part of the Arab world and therefore there is always a way to get things done (the secretary of the main officer in charge was a cousin of the guy helping me, etc.) and therefore I could leave the country in time without major issues! No data management can help with that

So bottom line is - I think what Oman achieved before the cyclone in terms of government data management can be seen as a 'best practice' (just try to compare this to the UK where hardly anything is linked!), but when leaping forward we cannot forget the basics - arrange sufficient protection for the vital records and have a plan in place for the worst!

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home