New Orleans' CIO/CTO says key lesson of Katrina is need for management and technology flexibility

Published 8 March 2006

If there is any lesson for IT managers to come out of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, one of the most critical is having management and technology flexibility. Greg Meffert, CTO and CIO for New Orleans, is a firm believer in both approaches. From a technology perspective, a system with proven value after Katrina is VoIP. When asked about the importance of VoIP to New Orleans, Meffert said simply, “Huge.” He is so convinced of it that he believes it is “crazy” for governments to continue to rely on landlines for communication. “It’s not a cute, new sexy technology anymore. To me, VoIP is much more beefy,” Meffert said in an interview. Jan Rideout, CIO at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems, which has facilities in the New Orleans area, said that, before the storm, the company had a three-year plan to put in VoIP and wireless networks. That rollout has since been accelerated to eighteen months. “It’s a big part of our recovery, and we believe it’s the way to go,” Rideout said.

VoIP is winning plaudits, but one technology practice that has clearly fallen out of favor is the use of tape backups. “One thing we have to think very seriously about is the backup scenario,” said Rizwan Ahmed, who was recently named CIO for the state of Louisiana after serving as CIO of the Office of Group Benefits and Department of Natural Resources. Ahmed said that IT managers need to store backups on a hard drive and replicate them off-site, so that “we have an easier way of actually replicating the data, because the tape is unreliable and also inefficient,” he explained.

Meffert believes most IT plans do not consider major disasters, and the idea that key personnel will arrive for work at a command center following major calamity is probably wishful thinking. More important, he argued, is the ability to recreate teams made up of people who can take on new tasks. “We were able to process payroll even before we had running water,” Meffert said.

-read more in this Computerworld report