Marty Fox, CBCP
Founder, Real Continuity
Three things I really enjoy are business continuity, technology and basketball. Two I have done professionally. Let’s play two truths and a lie. Which ones have I done professionally? Answer below – if you are interested. By the way, a fun way to break the ice to start your BC team offsite is ‘two truths and a lie’. Although, the one I described in this paragraph would have been pretty easy to guess, especially if you had seen me play.
I am proud that my programs have been 100% successful in responding to disruptive events, keeping enterprises going and most importantly insuring all employees were safe and gainfully employed during and after each event. Of course, many people played key roles in our ability to successfully respond and recover. A few of the disruptions include:
- Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy
- Oklahoma tornadoes
- 2003 Northeast power outage
- Boston Marathon terrorism
- Chili earthquakes
- Cyber-attacks
- Japan tsunami
- Mexico pandemic
- UK Saran attack
- break-down of critical logistic equipment
- and, of course, a squirrel eating through a critical data-center feed. More on that later.
My special niche and ‘passion’ within BC is leveraging technology to solve all kinds of business problems. This entails researching, testing and implementing BCM tools, mass notifications systems, apps and mashing data repositories to derive golden nuggets of information. I strongly believe data in many corporations has been underutilized. In my experience so much value is buried in silo’ed spreadsheets. We will discuss how to realize maximum value from your data in the May issue of Real Continuity.
I also enjoy squeezing value from cool technologies such as Raspberry Pi, Periscope, inexpensive sensors, virtual reality and all sorts of databases. Leveraging technology will make your company more resilient and profitable. Being innovative and not afraid to try new things is fun and can result in significant revenue.
You are fortunate; being a BC professional uniquely positions you to bring value to your company way beyond BC. We will delve into stretching technology in the June issue of Real Continuity.
Prior to BC I was a Senior Technology Officer for JP Morgan Chase. I developed hundreds of database applications and had a blast doing it. I was also the guy responsible for researching new technologies that could be leveraged by Chase internal developers. One cool perk was every year Chase would send me on a ‘technology hunting’ expedition to Comdex in Las Vegas to discover new technologies. Well someone had to do it!
Even now, I typically devote a minimum of fifteen hours each week researching and testing new technologies. Believe it or not, I never miss an episode of ‘geeky’ shows such as Click, Xploration Earth 2050 and Horizons. I scour the Internet for the latest Ted Talks and tech product reviews! If you are into that sort of stuff let me know. Some of my research is done on 90 minute treadmill workouts and many of my ideas on long walks. I suppose that is one area I can put my name in the same sentence as Steve Jobs. By-the-way as of his writing I have walked the length of The Great Wall of China – according to my latest Fitbit badge. I have also speed-walked multiple 5K’s, often beating hundreds of runners in a race. Maybe I walk too much?
My efforts to mine the tech world have produced some interesting wins in my BC role. BC departments are usually understaffed. Have you found that to be true? Technology can be the great equalizer for our little teams. I will share all of my tech ideas with you as often as I can. Hopefully, some will make your life easier, fun and profitable.
I love to create. Thru the years I wrote and published seven best-selling technology books and developed commercial database software used by thousands of people. There were occasions when a new book was released that my living room was stacked wall-to-wall with 5,000 of my books (most of which were already sold). My wife would pack them and bring them to the back of the Post Office by the carload and load them onto large rolling bins. Fortunately they sold well to a global readership, many in countries I had never heard of. Finally, I built and sold a popular web site during the dot com boom – but that is a story for another day.
Well I’m done. Sorry I was so long-winded. I promise this is the only page I will focus on Marty.
Oh yeah – two truths and a lie answer: Unfortunately bball was not one of my professions, except in some really cool dreams where I did 360 degree slam dunks over LeBron James, yeah I still have those types of dreams – sad but true.
