T 1.1 Loss of personnel

The loss of personnel can seriously affect an organisation and its business processes. Personnel may be absent unexpectedly due to illness, accidents, strikes, or death. Furthermore, foreseeable absences of personnel due to holidays, training programmes, or normal terminations of employment must be taken into consideration, especially when the time the employee is still available for work is shortened due to accrued vacation time, for example.

In all cases, one possible consequence is that crucial tasks will not be performed due to the loss of personnel. This is especially critical when the person affected fills a key position in the business process and this person cannot be replaced due to a lack of personnel disposing of the appropriate technical knowledge. This could result in disruptions to IT operations. This may also cause massive disturbances for other departments and processes of the organisation.

A loss of personnel can also result in a loss of knowledge and confidential information so severe that it becomes impossible to subsequently assign the corresponding tasks to someone else.

Examples:

• Due to a prolonged illness, the network administrator of a company was off work. The network of the company he worked for continued to operate without error at first. However, two weeks later the system crashed and no one was able to eliminate the error because this employee was the only one trained in the operation of the network. The result was that the network was unavailable for several days.
• While an administrator was on holiday, access to the backup tapes stored in the data safe was required for data backup purposes. The access code for the safe had been changed just before that, and the administrator was the only person who knew the new access code. It was only possible to restore the data after several days because it was impossible to reach the administrator any faster while on holiday.
• If there is a pandemic, more and more personnel will be absent for extended periods of time as the pandemic spreads, be it due to the illness itself, due to the necessity of caring for family members or taking care of children who cannot go to school or kindergarten, or simply due to the fear of becoming infected in public means of transportation or in the organisation. It will only be possible to perform the most essential tasks. The maintenance required for the systems, whether the central server or the air-conditioning system needed in the computer centre, cannot be performed any more. More and more systems will fail as time goes by due to the lack of maintenance.