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 1990’s while he was at Bell South. He was one of the first people to apply advanced root cause analysis (TapRooT®) to network reliability problems after he heard about TapRooT® from a consultant at AT&T (sorry – don’t know his/her name).

Soon after, another company focused on high reliability computer operations, Tandem Computers, adopted TapRooT® for analysis of reliability issues.

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

But multiple mergers, the tech crash, and secrecy about technology issues has made it difficult to spread the word about the application of root cause analysis to computer network reliability issues.

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

If you are in the network reliability and security business, I’d suggest attending a 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Course to learn the TapRooT® Techniques. Plus the course includes the patented TapRooT® Software (individual user edition) for each participant.

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 listed at:

http://www.taproot.com/courses.php?d=2