September 11, 2001: A study of the human aspects of disaster recovery efforts for Wall Street financial services firms.

详细信息   

• 作者：Virgona ; Thomas James.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2008
• 毕业院校：Long Island University
• 专业：Business Administration, General.;Information Science.
• ISBN：9780549557906
• CBH：3308552
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：1261432
• Pages：238

文摘

Single events have impacted information technology and the general society. The effects of Guttenberg's printing press were extraordinarily far-reaching: speed, uniformity of texts and relative cheapness (Eisenstein 1979). Another groundbreaking event in the field of information technology was the Soviet's launching of Sputnik in October 1957. As a result, the American government, educators and general society placed heavy focus on organizing scientific information, increasing science and technology education, and established a national center for scientific and technical information. A more recent phenomenon is the diffusion of computers, and more specifically, the Internet. The Internet is the fabric of our lives, a ubiquitous presence. Information technology is the present-day equivalent of electricity in the industrial era.;This research examined the changes to disaster recovery plans for financial firms located in the Wall Street area since the events of September 11, 2001. The literature indicates that disaster recovery plans usually rely upon human capital and expertise, which has required critical information service providers (e.g., the financial services industry) to reexamine existing contingency plans.1 This dissertation will investigate the role people played in the disaster recovery efforts and subsequent updates to disaster recovery plans to account for these roles and tasks.;Why study disasters at all? There is one main reason: The scholarly study of disasters helps answer important questions as societies try to maintain order in the face of uncertainty (Robert Stallings in Quarantelli 1998). For this dissertation, non-experimental design was used (exploratory and descriptive). Qualitative analysis is intended to produce an explanation of a phenomenon, particularly an identification of patterns. Specifically, the study included a focus group, unstructured interviews, and observations of a disaster recovery test and content analysis of disaster recovery plans. The research goal was to uncover what, if anything, we have learned from the events of September 11, 2001.;The devastating loss of life on September 11, 2001 was concentrated in the financial industry. Fatalities in that industry represented over 74 percent of the total civilian2 casualties in the World Trade Center attacks, and one firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, lost 658 employees (General Accounting Office 2003). Ironically, September 11, 2001 was not the first such attack aimed at Wall Street. On September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon carrying hundreds of pounds of explosives was detonated at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in lower Manhattan, killing thirty people and causing the New York Stock Exchange to close. The exchange reopened the next day and banking and financial activity quickly returned to normal (Brooks 1969). One difference between the incident in 1920 and 2001, aside from the magnitude of the loss of life, is the reliance on technology. Lacker calls this a "technology shock", a significant damage to operational capability due to either the inoperability of physical capital or the loss of staff (Lacker 2003).;The events of September 11, 2001 literally struck at the heart of America's financial information center, causing both immediate and long-term adjustments. Information technology professionals on Wall Street on September 11, 2001 were placed in a unique position at the center of a disaster, concerned for family members and asked to recover information system with little or no "status" information. These professionals performed the task to the best of their abilities despite enormous distractions. What was learned during this process may be critical for future designers of information systems: dependence on human resources is critical during emergencies, recovery plans may provide little or no value during an actual emergency, assumptions about travel or communications may all be invalid and the dependency on other firms may be essential.;1The penalty of a late information, even only a few minutes late, can be catastrophic to a company (Horton 1985). 2In this specific context, fire fighters and police are not considered "civilian".