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Lisa Hoover 0 Junior Poster

Unless you were unplugged and on living on a Himalayan mountaintop last week, you no doubt heard about the Great Facebook Flap of 2009. If not, then be sure to read Ron Miller's excellent recap at TechTreasures.

ComputerWorld's Frank Hayes posted a great article this morning that takes a look at how the ."

Hayes says last week's issues with Facebook speak to a increasing problem facing IT departments these days -- there's no longer a simple linear relationship between computers users and IT professionals. Now there business partners, vendors, suppliers, and service providers, each with their own agendas and business plans that could adversely impact how IT departments get the job done.

"A service provider could change its policies or outsource a function without warning us, thus suddenly breaking our promises to customers," says Hayes. "Our management could plan a merger or a new line of business without telling us -- instead handing us puzzling new procedures or terms to pass along to customers. A lawsuit could require us to do things that we can't explain to partners or even our own staff.

"See? It's a mess. And now it's our mess."

It may not be possible to avoid headaches brought on by the collision of competing agendas, but the best defense is a good offense. Read your EULAs and service agreements closely. Then read them again. Have your legal department scour them for potential pitfalls and problems. Identify weak spots, and develop a plan for dealing with worst-case scenarios brought on by providers who change the rules mid-game.

Above all, communicate with customers and users. When issues arise, keep them in the loop and let them know you're working towards finding solutions. You might not be able to head off problems entirely, but you can at least minimize the impact they have on your IT department and those you serve.

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As noted, the 2009 Facebook episode is a clear reminder that modern IT sits inside an ecosystem of vendors, business units, regulators and outside services. Practical defense means turning high-level warnings into a short, repeatable playbook that ties contracts to operations and makes recovery predictable instead of accidental.

  • Create a dependency map that lists each external service, the business process it supports, a single-point-of-failure flag, and an owner. Review the top-tier items quarterly.
  • Translate contract language into operational requirements: agreed change-notice windows, documented rollback options, explicit data-export formats, and acceptance tests that must be run before major provider changes.
  • Embed vendors in incident runbooks and include vendor contacts, legal, and communications in tabletop exercises at least annually.
  • Instrument vendor health: subscribe to provider status feeds, add independent monitoring where feasible, and alert on behavioral changes (API shape, auth failures, metadata).
  • Maintain a vendor risk register with simple scores (impact, likelihood, recoverability) and an approved alternate or mitigation for each high-impact entry.
  • Test exits: perform periodic data-export and restore drills to confirm portability and practical recovery times.

Operationalize the thread’s legal and communications advice by pre-authoring internal and customer templates and setting clear escalation thresholds. Prioritization is key: focus effort where outages cause revenue, compliance, or major customer harm. Contract language and regulatory obligations should be reviewed with counsel; the steps above translate those legal protections into actions that reduce the chance of being blindsided.

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