Case Study - Clydebank Housing Association

What do you do when your office burns to the ground? That’s what happened to Clydebank HA, as Jimmy Black explains in a postscript to last month’s IT feature.

After Years of Planning, Clydebank HA moved in March this year to a brand, spanking new half million pound office. And eight days later it burnt to the ground. By any measure, this was a disaster, and it certainly was for Clydebank. But some careful planning kept their business afloat.

“We lost all the paper,” says Fiona Webster, Clydebank HA’s Director. “All the registers and certificates are gone. We recovered the Seal, but it was just a lump of melted metal.”

“But absolutely without fail we took a backup of all the data on the server, every night, and a member of staff took it home. We also managed to recover the server’s hard disk from the wreckage.”

“We had ensured that all of the important phone numbers - staff, contractors, systems administrators - were available off site and that helped us get organized in the Recovery Suite, an office on a Bellshill industrial estate where we were able to set up a temporary base. In the end many of the tenants didn't notice any change in their service.”

In their disaster planning, Clydebank HA were greatly assisted by IT advisors Harkins & Anderson. But another company, Falkirk’s Capture All, made a significant contribution to the recovery effort.

“We had already decided to become a paperless office,” says Fiona, “and we had employed Capture All to transfer all our older paper records onto CD. So for example all our information on the 755 properties we took over from Scottish Homes in 1999 was saved.” Although any CD’s stored in Clydebank’s office were destroyed, Capture All maintain copies off site in case of disaster. Unfortunately they had only just started the job, and many records had still to be scanned.

As featured and re-produced with permission from Federation Focus, August 2002