It never had to strike!

The ACME disaster

The ACME disaster, like many other accidents, never had to happen. It could have been averted had the right information been available to the right people at the right time.

Happily, since the ACME disaster is a fictitious event involving a fictitious company, there is no need to describe or imagine unspeakable horrors or "just" the economic collapse of a company where people used to go to work and depended on to feed and house their families and children.

Fictitious companies are very useful because they can be considered rationally, hypotethically and even jokingly, unlike very real disasters that may end lives, and not just a business.

The space shuttle Challenger disaster

On January 26, 1986, 73 seconds after the rockets ignited, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and killed seven astronauts. As described very graphically by Yale professor Edward R. Tufte in the book "Visual explanations", the explosion was caused by a technical problem that was well known and documented. The disaster struck because enough information about the problem was not communicated well to the right people. In short, and very simply put, the real cause was an information problem.

Most screw-ups of this magnitude are explained only as "technical problems", and the fact that any such disaster could have been averted is usually covered up. Therefore it is very hard to say how many "man-made" disasters are caused by information problems, but surely there are many.

Business disasters don't have to be man-made

Most are, but often they don't even have to be made. Much of the business information in small companies is in the files on the file server. If any of it is vital to company survival, it makes sense to make sure it is easy to find the right information. The series of problems and events that lead to crises and disasters are usually hard to recognize, but they are often information problems and needless events.

AINTscience is definitely not an insurance against disaster, but it can improve the odds by making the information in files on the file server easier to find.

The next disk crash disaster

A type of disaster that often hits small businesses is loss of vital data from a crashed disk. While AINTscience won't prevent disks from crashing, it will make it easier to make sure that vital information is in the right place, where it can be regularly backed up to other storage. Most companies have backup systems or procedures these days, but the quality and completeness of what is actually on the backup is not always what it is believed to be.

Images: Top right shows lightning striking the Eiffel tower in 1902, which btw happens all the time, and is no disaster. To the left is Atlantis taking off in 1995. Happily, most space shuttle flights have been very successful. Image by NASA.