In a time when dinosaurs were in, the first Jurassic Park was a hit. T-Rex’s are pretty frigging cool. In the movie, the T-rex roar was a combination of an elephant, alligator and tiger sounds. This dinosaur was like the king of the jungle, but on another level.
If Jurassic Park was an actual theme park, they would have made a killing. Every kid, myself included would be begging our parents to take us there to see these almost mythical creatures from so long ago. I’m sure families wouldn’t be the only ones who would be going to see such a display. An entire island resort dedicated to being a dinosaur zoo. Seeing the lions at the zoo would be boring in comparison. In the novel, they were anticipating an annual revenue of over 20 billion dollars per year.
To accomplish this, the fictional entrepreneur, John Hammond leveraged bleeding edge science to clone animals from blood found in fossilized mosquitos. They had an entire team of scientists accomplishing this. They bought an entire island dedicated to the park. John Hammond himself claimed that “No expense was spared.”
Cascading Failures
Dennis Nedry, the IT guy in the story was actually a brilliant engineer, but unfortunately he was underfunded and poorly managed.
“I am totally unappreciated in my time! We can run the whole park from this room, with minimal staff, for up to three days. You think that kind of automation is easy? Or cheap? You know anybody who can network eight Connection Machines and de-bug two million lines of code for what I bid this job? Because I’d sure as hell like to see them try!”
In the film, you only see Dennis and Ray Arnold, the Chief Engineer for the park. No other IT staff. After he went missing, you get to witness firsthand a critical failure in the digital infrastructure. You see him initiate the failure before he flees because he was not “paid enough”. But what was actually worse, no one else knew how to do his job, or even parts of it. This left the facility crippled and unable to operate after his departure.
In a last ditch effort, the remaining engineer shut down the power in an attempt to reboot the system. This was not handled very well by the digital infrastructure and it was clear they were not prepared to do this and no fire drills have been done for this before. Who decided that the breaker for the entire island would be located in the middle of where raptors would be? Did no one test this??
In the end, the whole theme park ended in disaster. The people there were lucky to escape with their lives.
Every Company is Now a Technology Company
In short, this is a story of how a dinosaur theme park turned into a disaster. The owner of the business did not hold back on spending money to improve his park. Unfortunately, he did not consider that even his business, an island zoo showcasing dinosaurs, would either succeed or fail based on how well he leveraged technology.
This was a company that thought of themselves as a dinosaur zoo, and they didn’t think of themselves as a technology company, yet they went under because of a technology failure. Leveraging technology is now as important as marketing, sales, and finance. With us now living in a digital age, it’s difficult to even accomplish any of those without having to touch a computer.
Every company is now a technology company. And without heeding this cautionary tale, any company could be the next Jurassic Park.
e-Mayhem is Here to Help
We should be conscious of how technology is and how its evolving now an important aspect of every organization. If neglected, it will hold you back. Taken care of and utilized correctly, it will be a workforce multiplier
There is no set way to leverage technology that works for every company and industry because it doesn’t do anything alone. e-Mayhem is here to help you navigate the services and options that are best for your digital infrastructure. Contact us and we will help guide you in determining where to best provide value and determine what risks can be accepted to provide cost savings. See Responsible Tech Debt
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