Or: “I just fired my tech guy, my web­site is down and I’m not get­ting any email! What’s wrong?”

Excel­lent ques­tion! I’m glad you asked.

Most busi­ness own­ers under­stand their finances pretty well. After all, the finances are what allows the busi­ness to pros­per (or what causes the busi­ness to fade away when the finances aren’t strong). And, for the most part, they under­stand this enough that even if they lost “the accoun­tant”, they would still be able to main­tain basic account­ing needs for payables and receivables.

How­ever, there is often a reliance on tech­nol­ogy within an orga­ni­za­tion that is depen­dant on the “techie” being around. For a small busi­ness, this depen­dance can be some­what alle­vi­ated if a sec­ond per­son can be hired who has access to all the infor­ma­tion and resources as the pri­mary tech­ni­cal resource. But often, the finan­cial resources may not be avail­able to sup­port this.

In a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion, this can be even more trou­ble­some, as many resources are vol­un­teers who come and go at their whim. When all tech­ni­cal resources avail­able are offer­ing their time with­out pay, other pri­or­i­ties out­side of the orga­ni­za­tion may be more press­ing and/or inter­est­ing for them. And if all your tech­ni­cal eggs are in one bas­ket, what hap­pens when the bas­ket is dropped?

Solv­ing this prob­lem can be a dif­fi­cult chal­lenge for any orga­ni­za­tion. If the owner or board are not tech­ni­cal, it may be impos­si­ble to under­stand all of the tech­nol­ogy in use within their orga­ni­za­tion. And this gets to the heart of the above ques­tions. Even if you don’t know how the tech­nol­ogy all works, nor have a plan for how to replace an unex­pected loss of your pri­mary tech­ni­cal per­son­nel, there are some basic steps that can make the tran­si­tion easier.

Most peo­ple, if they lost their life’s trea­sures from dis­as­ter, would prob­a­bly make a rough guess of what the value of their goods are. But few peo­ple keep a detailed list of their valu­ables. And then there are the trea­sures and memen­toes that are irre­place­able, for one rea­son or another.

When it comes to your orga­ni­za­tion, you should not fol­low this pat­tern. The key is to have your tech­ni­cal assets doc­u­mented. And if you don’t know what your tech­ni­cal assets are, here’s a short list of some of the impor­tant ones:

1. Your DNS (domain name sys­tem) reg­is­trar and renewal dates. With­out this, your domain name (or online orga­ni­za­tion iden­tity – e.g., ‘metrex.net’ is ours) may expire, and your cus­tomers wont be able to send you email nor find your web­site. If you con­duct busi­ness online, this will have an imme­di­ate neg­a­tive finan­cial result.
2. Your web host and renewal dates. Like your domain name, if you for­get to pay for your web­site (as well as sev­eral other sce­nar­ios), your web site may dis­ap­pear. In this case, you may still be able to get email (if your email is not with the same com­pany) but your cus­tomers wont be able to find your website.
3. Your email host and renewal dates. Like your domain name, if you for­get to pay for your email host­ing (as well as sev­eral other sce­nar­ios), you may no longer be able to receive email from your cus­tomers. Although they may be able to get to your web site, you may not be able to eas­ily com­mu­ni­cate with them online.
4. Where is all your data stored and backed up? In the case of sys­tem crashes, or gen­eral dis­as­ters, or dis­as­ters at your web host­ing com­pany, etc., you may need to recover data from a data­base backup. Where is the backup? If you find it, where does the data need to go? Do you have pass­words to access the data­base servers if needed? Or, if your data is out­sourced, does your out­sourc­ing com­pany have access to do this?
5. What kinds of fire­walls, routers, and server equip­ment is located at your office? Do you have the pass­words for all these? Is there a net­work map iden­ti­fy­ing how all these sys­tems are interconnected?

The above list is by no means exhaus­tive. I’m try­ing to be brief and not too tech­ni­cal, and there are some terms used above with which you may not be famil­iar. Ide­ally, your tech­ni­cal staff should be able to pre­pare a detailed inven­tory that you could take to a third party orga­ni­za­tion and iden­tify if the list is rea­son­able for your orga­ni­za­tion. How­ever, with­out an audit, it will be impos­si­ble to deter­mine the accu­racy or com­plete­ness. So expect that there are some costs involved in this process. But with­out the answers, it could be even more costly.