Planning for Continuity

The terrorist attacks on September 11 had a major impact on special libraries. Offices operating in the World Trade Center (WTC) were destroyed. People working in nearby buildings were displaced. Everyone's work was disrupted, and valuable resources, including most print collections, were lost.

For survivors, quick thinking, good advanced planning, and teamwork made it possible to get back in business speedily and effectively. At the same time, the disaster has prompted some libraries to update and revamp their plans, as they must consider previously unimaginable contingencies.

Across the street from the World Trade Center, Lehman Brothers' Business Information Services (BIS) management team got all 58 of its New York–based staff safely out of Three World Financial Center. Marty Cullen (on our cover), manager of reference services in the BIS department and a vice president of Lehman Brothers, was designated by his boss, Division Head Rich Willner, to be communications manager for the Business Services Group (BSG). The group is comprised of Business Information Services, Computer Graphics, and Print & Distribution Services—200 Lehman employees in all.

Thanks to the company's Y2K planning, Lehman had off-site contingency and staff contact plans. Limited operations were in place after one day, and everyone was back to work in seven business days, either in multiple locations in New York City or across the river in Jersey City, NJ. Mobility was the key benefit derived from the Y2K efforts. Managers in the BIS have passwords and software for all of their significant databases and URLs for quality resources, so that they can be used from home or at other Lehman Brothers facilities. Managers also have home phone numbers and addresses for all staff members.

Cullen first aimed to ensure that all 200 members of the group at least had a seat, sometimes shared. Six weeks after the attacks, the BIS was operating out of four locations, in New York City and Jersey City, with researchers working in two shifts. Their clients are in three main locations, scattered around the region. The BSG occupies the leased conference center—one large room—at the Sheraton New York hotel. The BIS staff work in half of that room, in cramped, noisy surroundings, on portable tables, with some equipment on the floor, and with telephones that sometimes don't work. Across the room are the Computer Graphics and Print & Distribution Services staff.

After solving the space issues, explained Cullen, "The next step was to brand all our services to our internal clients. Every floor, elevator, and lobby where our clients were housed was branded with hotline numbers and locations for all of our services." On a daily basis, senior management of the BSG "pressed the flesh and were on-site wherever our internal clients were."

Carol Ginsburg, managing director of Global Business Information Services (GBIS) at Deutsche Bank, worked in 130 Liberty Street, on the opposite side of the WTC complex from Lehman Brothers. She and her staff, who survived a frightening escape, haven't been back since.

This wasn't Ginsburg's first crisis. In 1993 she implemented an emergency plan when a major fire displaced GBIS from its facilities for three weeks. A few days after the fire, Ginsburg was allowed access to her office for 15 minutes. Retrieving her Rolodex was her first priority. Her disaster plan in 1993 included a telephone chain for communicating with all of her staff and keeping backup manuals and resources at home. Referring to that ordeal, Ginsburg said, "We never stopped running, although we limped for two days." She uses nearly the same words to describe the aftermath of September 11.

Ginsburg's staff, like Cullen's, are working in borrowed, inefficient, cramped space in Midtown Manhattan. Twenty-two full-time and six part-time people share two offices and four cubicles in one building. Researchers work split shifts, 8:30 a.m.–7 p.m. two days a week and a half-day on Wednesday, where, at midday, the shifts overlap. Ginsburg has sent two people to the bank's Baltimore facility temporarily, and she is "leaning on other sites," including international ones, "when we are desperate." Some people are working from home.

Ginsburg's efforts to get GBIS back into operation didn't gain the department any "points" from its equally stressed clients. "They were up. They expected it from us," Ginsburg said. "We didn't get any kudos." Like Cullen, Ginsburg was concerned about leading clients to the services they needed. The first step was to create voice-mail messages and, as soon as backup systems were in place, to change the intranet telephone directory, an essential part of reinstating communications within the bank.

At Lehman, clients of the BIS relied on the team headed by Director Tom Fearon and Cullen. "I believe we provided leadership for the firm," Cullen said. "When you have an entire firm working out of different locations, people who experienced September 11, we provided a sense of normalcy and stability. The research process is where the deal origination process for investment banking starts, so it became critical for us to be up and running. The fact that we came through and were viable enhanced the already existing partnerships."

Part of Ginsburg's GBIS disaster recovery plan is mandated and administered by her parent organization. After the 1993 experience, she built in more redundancy. Also, on September 12, she held a brainstorming session with her staff, so they were part of the decision-making process. "The last time, I decided I should have fed people, so this time, for the first week, I did." She also mentioned the kindness of colleagues and vendors who sent messages of support, offered space and help, and sent flowers and cookies, all of which helped people who were stressed to cope emotionally and maintain a sense of teamwork.

People were the key to success, say both Ginsburg and Cullen. When asked the one piece of advice he has for those creating disaster plans, Cullen said, "Make sure you hire team players. After September 11, we had many people doing tasks that were different from their normal jobs. The most amazing thing to me was that all our service volumes equaled or surpassed pre–September 11 figures in a short amount of time, and we were able to deliver." Cullen stressed the importance of managers being "in the trenches" with the staff and that all involved maintain a sense of humor.

Redundancy will be part of any new plan created by Lottie Lindberg, head librarian at the offices of the Wall Street Journal, 200 Liberty St., in the World Financial Center. "How do I expect to respond to the events of September 11? It made me realize that I need to have the information necessary to my daily job kept in duplicate locations," she said. Prior to September 11, the company had plans in place to provide alternative locations for employees, but the plans were just for equipment and communication needs. "I'm in a 'make do' situation, and it is frustrating," Lindberg said.

Now operating from offices in Princeton, NJ, Lindberg won't be able to visit her old office for many weeks to see what can be salvaged. She was able to resume database searches almost immediately but found that two paper resources, a road atlas and the World Almanac, were the fastest way to find concise answers to many questions. While electronic resources are even more important than before the attack, she said, reference books remain valuable.

Lindberg advises others to keep contact names, addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, passwords, and ID numbers recorded in something portable—a daily organizer, a Palm Pilot, a Blackberry, or a computer file. "Trying to gather all this information after you are prevented from returning to your office is time-consuming," she said. "It also adds stress to an already stressful situation."

The library plan at USA Today is part of a larger companywide plan. Because of the proprietary nature, Library Director Barbara Maxwell was prevented from describing it in detail, though she said the library is an integral part of the plan. Staffers are prepared to work from home or other locations as necessary. Certain library departments might be closed in order to focus resources in an emergency. For example, on September 11, because of reduced staffing, the reference service stayed open, but the photo library and public reference desk were closed.

Understandably, some people who were near ground zero in New York City and Washington, DC, are so wrapped up in the recovery process that they didn't have the time, energy, or emotional capacity to talk about recovery plans; they are improvising as they go along. People working for defense contractors and government agencies and in other sensitive situations were not permitted to answer questions on the record. Sadly, many people are preparing new operating plans based on the postattack downsizing that they are calling "the next disaster."

Several people sheepishly hesitated to answer questions for this article, because they had no plan. Daille Pettit, director of information services for the American Hotel and Lodging Association, located four blocks from the White House, acknowledged that as her organization was evacuating its offices as a precaution on September 11, she realized that she needed a disaster plan.

One person in a well-known technology company, who asked to remain anonymous, said he is beginning to develop a library plan, approaching it scenario by scenario, based on the disasters the facility might face. His first concern is finding out whether system backups for his company are also stored off-site. "I really should start thinking about the steps to take in recovering materials, repairing the damaged ones, cleaning up the library, and reestablishing library service to users," he added.

Marlene Vogelsang, resource specialist at the San Francisco–based Pacific Energy Center of Pacific Gas & Electric Company, said, "We have had plans in place in case of a power outage, which was the crisis we were expecting to occur many times over the summer." However, she acknowledged that she lacked a specific plan for the library and was beginning to work on one.

Disasters take many forms—flood, fire, earthquake, tornado, hurricane, extended power outages, civil disturbance, attacks on information technology, and more. Prior to September 11, no one could have conceived of or planned for a disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks.

Many people use the term "disaster preparedness and recovery," but Eugenie Prime, manager of corporate libraries at Hewlett Packard's (HP) Research Labs in Palo Alto, says her company's plan is a "business continuity process." While that may sound like a positive, proactive label, one company also used that phrase to justify its announcement of massive layoffs. Whatever they call it, information professionals should take the events of September 11 as the impetus for creating a plan. The HP approach should be one model.

Kathy Gust, information research analyst in Prime's shop, authored the library's plan for 2001. In it, they assess the risk of disruptions in service and the level of disruption (from minor to catastrophic). "It is based on our group's business activities and explains in some detail how parts of our business applications and processes would be recovered under various interruption conditions," Gust said.

The 20-page plan has two parts. The first part lists details of business activities, how to respond to a business interruption (whom to contact, what to expect them to do, etc.); emergency procedures; minimum needs to continue to operate; and interactions with other groups, such as customers and vendors. The second part deals with scenarios of possible disruptions and the details of recovery plans for each one.

In organizing the library's plan, Gust consulted the plans of other HP departments, as well as guidelines issued by the labs' management team. The primary focus of the plan, once staff and clients are evacuated safely, is getting the IT infrastructure back in place. The secondary focus is on getting the local staff offices and collections accessible.

Three libraries serving Raytheon Systems in the North Texas area share a plan based on a corporatewide matrix. Senior Technical Librarian Kathy Nordhaus explained, "I had to follow what was provided." Her network catalog is backed up daily, so re-creating the inventory would be relatively quick. Files for their intranet are at a different site, providing automatic redundancy. An informal companywide network of information centers covers the United States and some international sites, providing yet another form of backup. The departmental plans are updated annually.

"Talking about and developing the plan was the most important part of the entire process," said Cindy Hill, manager of the SunLibrary at Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto, CA. "It gave us the opportunity to explore important issues that we would not have considered during our normal, day-to-day processes."

Sun staffers used resources and sample plans from the Information Resource Center at the Special Libraries Association (SLA), other corporate libraries, select public and academic libraries, and other departments within Sun to develop their plan. Each member of the SunLibrary staff was interviewed to ensure that all essential components of the library's service were covered. "We concentrated on reestablishing our electronic resources first since the majority of our clientele accesses us via our web sites and our intranet," Hill said, stressing that the safety of people is the real first priority.

Cullen, current president of the SLA New York Chapter, moderated an "evening of healing" on October 22. The event was a memorial for the three special librarians lost on September 11: Helen Belilovsky of Fred Alger Management and Maureen Olson and Margaret Orloske, both of Marsh & McLennen ( see News, LJ 10/16/01 ).

The main speaker for the evening, a specialist in grief counseling, encouraged people to express their feelings and concerns and to continue taking care of each other for months to come. She shared some thoughts from Hopi philosophy that says periodic catastrophe is required to make the nation stronger.

New and strengthened disaster preparedness and recovery plans for special libraries will result from the September 11 attacks. "I don't know whether we will ever occupy our building again," said Cullen, referring to the World Financial Center location. Lehman has purchased a midtown building from Morgan Stanley and will continue to maintain offices in Jersey City, so operating in multiple locations should continue for Cullen and the BIS. Ginsburg's library will set up a new facility in a midtown building owned by Deutsche Bank. Lindberg will remain in Princeton even after some of her newspaper's staff return to the World Financial Center. Regardless of where they are located, special librarians and information professionals are an integral part of the recovery process that will maintain the economic viability of their organizations and of the country.