The Impact of a Network Outage

It is a bit embarrassing that it has been so long since I last posted to this blog. But I guess it is a good sign that we are very busy around here…

Today we had a switch that sits between our office and our MindAlign (Group Chat) servers die, and so our teams (Dev, Support, QA) were without MindAlign for an entire morning.

When I arrived at the office, my original thought was that great, I can have some un-interrupted time to get some work done while the network is being fixed. What I realized is that not having a chat system is quite the opposite; I ended up being more un-productive as a result of not being able to quickly find information or drop ideas and tasks to other team members in chat.

I once heard someone say that if you have trouble falling asleep after waking up in the middle of the night with ideas and thoughts that you would counter this by keeping pen and paper on the bedside table. The idea is that you can write down the idea and that your brain would give it up, knowing that it was logged, and allow you to go back to sleep.

Ironically, today I felt the same way about not having chat. While working on a document for a customer there were several thoughts that came to my mind. However, instead of being able to drop a message into a chat room covering the topic of my thought, I was forced to either keep thinking about the concept and/or walk over to someone and talk to them about the topic. The result was that I was interrupted from my document, and therefore it took me longer to write the doc. Furthermore, there were cases where I needed information from people to complete the doc. Again, instead of being able to asynchronously drop a question, knowing that the answer would come later, I had to synchronously walk over to someone’s desk and ask the question. The result again was that I was less productive than I could have been.

We talk extensively about the way people work in an environment where everyone is connected to their peers in real-time. Sometimes it is easy to dream about the past and think about a time when we used to have less connectivity. Today taught me that while it may be quieter when you are not connected, quieter actually does not equate to being more productive. In fact I think that the opposite is true.

Comments

[Praveen]

This is where system administrators are so important. Infact we don't realise the importance of things as long as they work flawless :)