|
Epilogue: The Return
Several months after Katrina, most of the water is gone, but vast portions of New Orleans resemble a ghost town. Blue plastic tarps patch roofs ripped by the storm, and heaps of debris are everywhere. Piles of abandoned refrigerators stand on corners, many bearing messages that bespeak pain and anger: "Katrina, kiss my ice," "FEMA, look inside for dinner" and "From the people of New Orleans to George Bush." Forsaken cars litter sidewalks, parks have been turned into huge, stinking garbage dumps, and every major street is festooned with small signs shouting business opportunities: "We gut," "Got mold?" and "Signs like these in 24 hours."
But Oreck headquarters hums with life, especially at lunchtime, when employees gather for a catered meal in a conference room because so many local restaurants are still closed.
Tom Oreck says that 250 employees lost their homes and 100 employees have never been heard from, but he returned to New Orleans to find that his own home suffered only minor storm damage and no flooding. "I was very lucky," he says.
So was Evanson, even though a 100-foot pine tree had crashed into his roof, coming to rest in the master bedroom closet where he stored his collection of thousands of vinyl records. A box of 45s was smashed, but the records inside were not damaged. Rainwater had run along the tree trunk and away from the records.
Down on the Gulf Coast near the factory, a number of families are still living in company-furnished trailers. An employee relief fund has raised nearly $1 million to help displaced workers. "Preparation and planning kept us from go-ing out of business," Oreck says. "You prepare and you plan, and then you aggressively improvise."
On the other side of the large plant, Evanson ponders the lessons from Katrina.
"It can happen to you," Evanson says. "The most important thing is the recognition that IT is only a tiny part of a disaster plan. The disaster plan needs to include the whole business. Think long and hard about how to operate remotely. Make sure you have a good disaster plan with your business partners. That's a gap in all the disaster plans I've done."
Between the time lost to the hurricane and the lapse until the company was able to pick up the project again, Katrina set the enterprise resource planning system replacement process back about eight months. So Evanson has been forced to start some patch-up projects on the legacy systems. New Orleans was not exactly a hotbed of IT talent before Katrina; now Evanson expects it will be harder than ever to hire skilled people. Before the storm, he was looking to add more than a dozen people; now he's down six employees, who quit to take other jobs during the chaos.
"I just cannot wait on SAP completion," he says. "The eight-month delay means I won't complete SAP before next hurricane season, so I have to put together a new disaster plan based on our current systems. I lost 25% of my IT staff, including a few really key people, and have had difficulty filling the open positions. When I restart SAP, I'm going to have to run the project from another city for a while. There just aren't 15 hotel rooms available in New Orleans to house the implementation team right now."
The company is also rewriting its disaster recovery plan, reviewing the details of what worked and what didn't.
"We're convinced we can put together a plan that will allow us to operate through a similar disaster with no downtime," he says. "We continually ask the question 'What could we have done to prevent this problem in the first place?' These meetings will continue until we complete and test a new disaster plan for the company. We will have one in place before next hurricane season."
Plans are fine, Evanson adds, but it's the people who implement them that really make the difference. "Disaster brings out the real character in people and companies as well," Evanson says. "We had critical people coming unglued. We also had a lot of heroes here."
Michael Ybarra was a senior features writer at CIO Decisions. Tom Kaneshige was a senior features editor at CIO Decisions. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
|
