Monday Accident & Lessons Learned: Michigan State Computer Outages – Time for Root Cause Analysis for Reliable Computer Network Operations?

Government Technology published an interesting summary of two serious computer outages that occurred in the State of Michigan.

Whenever I read about such outages, I think of the work of TapRooT® User Gerald Starling back in the 1990s while he was at Bell South. He was one of the first people to apply advanced root cause analysis (TapRooT® RCA) to network reliability problems after he heard about TapRooT® RCA from a consultant at AT&T (sorry—I don’t know his/her name).

Soon after, Tandem Computers, another company focused on high-reliability computer operations, adopted TapRooT® RCA to analyze reliability issues.

Also, several government agencies adopted TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to analyze computer security issues (hackers and such).

However, multiple mergers, the tech crash, and secrecy about technology issues have made it difficult to spread the word about applying root cause analysis to computer network reliability issues.

Maybe the time is right to spread advanced root cause analysis across the computer industry to help improve network reliability.

If you are in the network reliability and security business, I suggest attending a 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Course to learn the TapRooT® Techniques. 

You’ll have to do a little translation (the examples in the class are not network reliability examples – the rest of the attendees wouldn’t understand them if they were), but others have told us that the learning is directly applicable to security and reliability issues of computer networks. See for yourself. Attend one of the courses.

CLICK HERE for upcoming course dates and locations.