Go Lean Commentary
Facebook’s 31 minute failure is the subject of the foregoing news article and VIDEO.
By: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY Blogger
Access to Facebook’s website and apps went down just before 4 a.m. ET on Thursday, shutting out millions of users for a brief period.
For about half an hour, users who tried to access Facebook in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Israel and India received the following message: “Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”
Problems were also reported across multiple nations in Asia and the Middle East. Shortly after the outage, #Facebookdown started trending all over the world on Twitter.
Attempts by USA TODAY to reach the Menlo Park, Calif.,-based social networking company (at 9:00am) for a fuller explanation of the disruptions were not immediately successful.
In April, Facebook’s revenue rocketed 72% higher to $2.5 billion.
USA Today – Daily Newspaper (Retrieved 06/19/2014 @ 9:03am EDT) –
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/19/facebook-down/10834461/
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VIDEO – Facebook suffers worldwide outage – https://www.today.com/video/today/55451289
“No big deal – 31 minutes at 4am should not be a burden!”
The problem is that it breaks the promise of 24-7-365 continuous operations. This is a failure and there must be some accountability. This is the attitude, ethos, forged by adherents of lean principles. This is the basis for the book Go Lean…Caribbean, which serves as a roadmap for the introduction of the lean and technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU).
Just the very label “lean” is indicative of this quest. This point is pronounced early in the book (Page 4):
For the CU, lean is a noun, a verb and an adjective. The institutions of the CU will lean on, lean in, lean over backwards, and then lean towards…
The CU will embrace lean, agile, efficient organization structures – more virtual, less physical, more systems, less payroll. A lean organization understands value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer/constituent/beneficiary through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste…
Thusly, this Go Lean roadmap for the CU has 3 prime directives:
- Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
- Establishment of a security apparatus to protect the resultant economic engines.
- Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines.
Facebook is big business; as the world’s premier social media site, with over a billion unique users, it is also the model of the Caribbean Cloud web-based network proposed by the Go Lean roadmap. This is dubbed as myCaribbean.gov.
These subjects of Facebook and social media/electronic storefront websites have been previously covered in these Go Lean blogs, highlighted here in the following samples:
| a. | http://www.goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1350 | PayPal expands payment services to 10 markets |
| b. | http://www.goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=1112 | FB’s Zuckerberg’s $100 Million for Newark’s Schools was a waste |
| c. | http://www.goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=528 | Facebook plans to provide mobile payment services |
| d. | http://www.goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=486 | Incubator firm backs Southeast Asia cab booking mobile app |
| e. | http://www.goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=476 | Grenada PM Urges CARICOM on ICT |
| f. | http://www.goleancaribbean.com/blog/?p=308 | Caribbean Communications Infrastructure Program (CARCIP) Urges Greater Innovation |
The people and institutions of the Caribbean understand this plight of system failures all too well, as reported in the foregoing news article regarding Facebook last night. There is little faith in utility monopolies in the Caribbean member-states; black-outs, brown-outs, spotty internet, unreliable telephone and cable TV service are the norm. The reputation is in tatters for the region as efficient destinations for business operations. The book posits that to adapt, there must be optimizations of best practices for technology. This is defined in Verse XXVII (Page 14) of the Declaration of Interdependence, with these words:
Whereas the region has endured a spectator status during the Industrial Revolution, we cannot stand on the sidelines of this new economy, the Information Revolution. Rather, the Federation must embrace all the tenets of Internet Communications Technology (ICT) to serve as an equalizing element in competition with the rest of the world. The Federation must bridge the digital divide and promote the community ethos that research/development is valuable and must be promoted and incentivized for adoption.
Creating the CU’s Caribbean Cloud is “Step One, Day One” in the Go Lean roadmap. Implementing the architectural, application and administrative platform is critical for success. The roadmap specifically identified Service Level Agreements (SLA) that the CU will present to its stakeholders: citizens and member-state governments.
If the Caribbean Cloud was down for 31 minutes at 4am on a Thursday morning, there would be financial consequences to pay!
The Go Lean book details a series of community ethos, strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to foster the best practices for deployments of Information Technologies in the Caribbean region:
| Community Ethos – Economic Principles Can Influence Choices | Page 21 |
| Community Ethos – Light Up the Dark Places | Page 23 |
| Community Ethos – “Crap” Happens | Page 23 |
| Community Ethos – Lean Operations | Page 24 |
| Community Ethos – Return on Investments | Page 24 |
| Community Ethos – Ways to Impact the Future | Page 26 |
| Community Ethos – Ways to Foster Genius | Page 27 |
| Community Ethos – Promote Intellectual Property | Page 29 |
| Community Ethos – Ways to Bridge the Digital Divide | Page 31 |
| Strategy – Customers – Citizens and Member-states Governmental | Page 47 |
| Tactical – Separation of Powers – Revenue Administration Data Centers | Page 74 |
| Tactical – Separation of Powers – Energy Commission – Better Power | Page 82 |
| Implementation – Year 1 / Assemble Phase – Data Center Deployments | Page 96 |
| Implementation – Trends in Implementing Data Centers | Page 106 |
| Implementation – Improve Mail Services – Electronic Supplements | Page 108 |
| Implementation – Ways to Deliver | Page 109 |
| Implementation – Ways to Impact Social Media – Facebook Model | Page 111 |
| Implementation – Ways to Improve Energy Usage and Lower Costs | Page 113 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Grow the Economy | Page 151 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Improve Communications | Page 186 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Improve Emergency Management | Page 196 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Foster Technology | Page 197 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Foster e-Commerce | Page 198 |
| Advocacy – Reforms for Banking Regulations | Page 199 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Impact Monopolies | Page 202 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Promote Call Centers | Page 212 |
| Advocacy – Ways to Impact the Diaspora | Page 217 |
| Appendix – Alternative Remittance Modes | Page 270 |
| Appendix – Hydrogen Fuel Cells Data Centers | Page 285 |
| Appendix – ITIL Supplement – Service Continuity Management | Page 338 |
Now is the time for all of the Caribbean, the people and governing institutions, to lean-in for the empowerment described in the book Go Lean … Caribbean. The benefits are richly rewarding: more uptime and less downtime.
The region needs technology; we must fully embrace Internet & Communications Technology – we need our technology up, all the time: 24-7-365. This embrace will allow us to better compete with the rest of the world, and make our Caribbean homeland, a better place to live, work and play.
Download the Book- Go Lean…Caribbean Now!!!