Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Thirteen: Designing for Resilience 209ple, one system “crash” may result in an hour of downtime during which the problemis analyzed; perhaps another hour is lost while operations are restored; and finallythere is an adjustment phase during which…the system again reaches stable onlineoperations. All of these delays have significant, and at times disastrous, impactson corporate operations…Large monolithic systems still tend to be unwieldy. 94Mainframe computers not only failed often and expensively; they also turnedout to be harder to understand and repair than small systems. Modificationswere painfully slow and often introduced new errors. 95 Since there is no such personas an “average user,” all users were in some degree unhappy with the centralcomputer’s mismatch to their own needs, and they found in it little flexibility toadapt as those needs changed. The malaise became widespread:During the 1960s, there was a general thrust toward centralizing all the data processingwithin an organization in the hope that this approach would serve all users.In fact, it did not serve either the central data processing staff or dispersed usersas well as was expected…[and attempts at a remedy] resulted in many disappointmentsas well as some conceptual misdirections in the development of managementinformation systems. 96As with the energy system, too, security concerns emerged as the visiblevulnerability of the mainframe computers began to attract predators. Fifteenbombings in ten months blasted French computer facilities. 97 It became clearthat a major California earthquake could make Visa ® and Mastercharge ® ‚ collapseif computing were not restored within a few days. And the incentives forcriminals were high. The first international symposium on computer security98 heard an American expert “who has so far succeeded in classifying eighthundred types of computer crime” warn thatWithin ten years the real threat to world stability would not be nuclear [war]…butthe ability of one nation to enslave another by paralyzing its computers…[In] WestGermany…an operator had succeeded in stealing twenty-two magnetic[tapes]…essential to the operation of a large chemical group. The board hesitatedbriefly before handing over two hundred thousand dollars’ ransom to recover[them]…Many banks are even more vulnerable…Were a big bank to be affected…therewould be inevitable and serious repercussions on the economy of thecountry where it was based. 99In 1979 alone, six hundred thirty-three cases of computer crime were discovered(three-quarters of them in the United States). In 1981, some eighteen hundredto twenty-seven hundred were forecast just in the U.S., 100 of which only fif-