Having made my predictions for the year to come before the recent inclement weather, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking. I wanted to join other pundits in making my forecast for the decade. Yet, since most people can’t even decide what to call the decade, and since I myself keep failing to cross the first hurdle (believing that the infrastructure to make anything positive happen will be in place) I’ve decided not to.

Instead this post is a friendly reminder of what seems to be becoming my mantra: only an ultra high availability infrastructure will ensure that the expected service levels of the new decade are met…

I guess the inclement weather has taught all of us a thing or two over the last few weeks. It may have been the worst for the last 30 years, but it still amazes me how much disruption a natural event is causing.

I remember family stories (the good old days when grandfathers had to walk to work) where the snow was so high, you found yourself walking over hedges, ending up in the middle of a field and not realising where you were (or perhaps the beer was stronger back then).

I admit it has been pretty cold – the car thermometer said -11 where I live yesterday, but I remember -18 as short a while ago as 1995.

Since making my predictions last year, these allegedly extreme conditions have affected me in many ways: flights delayed/cancelled; roads closed; a power cut; my bank deciding to shut all my accounts in error. Connecting all of this is a common theme: the fragility of our infrastructure.

Link this fragility to aggressive “efficiencies” that have been put in place by various organisations due to extreme conditions and it is beyond fragile. It’s broken.

Technology can help people during times of extreme weather. We can fall back on “technology” to, for example, research information on the weather/flights/roads and to work, bank and shop  from home. Often, however, service providers’ IT infrastructures simply can’t take the strain.

Visitors to National Rail Enquiries, the Highway Agency and the RAC’s web sites, for example, found this out last week, according to the Daily Telegraph.

If, in this day and age, snow can still cause havoc for travel websites, then I fear for the government’s plans for 2014 becoming a reality and am certainly not prepared to commit my predictions for the new decade to media, just in case they come true.

I am, however, interested in hearing yours, so come on, what do you want the new decade’s availability story to be? Let’s get some discussion going…