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New regulatory and legal standards for corporate governance have
dramatically elevated the level of chief executive and board
member involvement in mission critical operations, which were previously
the sole concern of technical and facility managers. Both
the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and recent legal interpretations have redefined directors’ fiduciary duty as “active monitoring” of corporate operations
rather than reliance on management to control risks. Because of
the extreme financial, operational and security risks presented by mission
critical functions and facilities, chief executives and directors
must have independent understanding of the threshold concepts applied
in these operations. This is the first in a series of white papers
to examine these threshold considerations for the benefit of C-suite
executives and fiduciaries.
Progression to Hypercritical Thinking
The world of mission critical operations and facilities is dynamic, without
a defined doctrine and reliant on information exchange between
stakeholders. Engineering facility reliability is less a disciplined science
than a practiced
art continually advanced by deep and refined experience. Standards
are neither universally defined nor absolutely practiced; protocols are based
on the
nuanced balance of cost constraints and performance objectives.
With more acute risk awareness, facilities recognized as hypercritical are
assigned
greater resources. However, distinctions in standards and techniques
are diminishing over time; global best practices applied to
Hypercritical Facilities™ are
becoming the norm for all.
Unique Challenges
Overseeing mission critical facilities introduces unique
challenges to be monitored:
- Uptime, reliability and security objectives must be balanced
with prudent risk analysis. Cost-effectiveness
must be realized within balanced budgetary constraints.
- Marketplace impacts of failure can be high and compounded
by visibility, liability, negative publicity and
additional downstream vulnerabilities. Critical facilities
must therefore
move to a “front-of-house” consideration.
- Adequate testing, training, equipment maintenance, upgrades
and expansions can only occur within
the high stress environment of 24/7/365 operations.
- There are industry-specific, SEC and other regulatory
compliance factors to consider.
- Installations and modifications must proceed
quickly to optimize
productivity and minimize unscheduled disruptions.
- Prudence demands a broader view of continuity and disaster
recovery planning.
The life cycle phases of a critical or
Hypercritical Facility™ are site
selection/planning, designing, constructing,
commissioning, validating, operating,
maintaining and ongoing reassessment.
Decisions at each phase are influenced
by threshold views of security, reliability,
flexibility, uptime and human factors.
Executives and directors can better
interpret decisions about mission
critical facilities by grasping the threshold
concepts examined in-depth in this
and future white papers in this series.
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