IF KODAK HAD WAITED four more days to implement disaster recovery plans in Florida, it would have been too late. In September 1998, Hurricane Georges was barreling toward the Miami computing center, which supports some of the photography giant's Latin American operations. Only four days after the first test of the recovery plans had been completed at the site, managers declared a disaster and closed up shop in enough time not only to back up vital records but also to do another set of backups when the shipping company destroyed the first ones with an X-ray machine. Back at headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., systems safely restored, CIO John Chiazza sent out certificates declaring those involved in the close call "disaster masters."

The deadly storm that dumped two feet of water on parts of the Sunshine State and left hundreds of thousands of residents without electricity isn't the only time Eastman Kodak has tested aspects of its disaster recovery program. Each piece of the program is tested at least once a year but would get a workout even without planned tests. In separate incidents, backhoes five miles from headquarters destroyed main and backup telephone cables, air conditioning hoses spewed computer rooms with 8,000 gallons of water, ice storms caused power outages and left employees stranded. Tie-clad employees tell these war stories calmly, as if they watched from a heavily armored tank.

The business continuity program at this Fortune 500 company with 80,000-plus employees reaches into computer rooms around the world, spanning the mainframe to call center to telecommunications to vital records. The program has won Kodak accolades from insurance agents and analysts, and in 1999 it earned its long-time manager, Richard Corcoran, a place in Contingency Planning and Management magazine's Hall of Fame. And now that recovery plans for the mission-critical portions of IS are so ingrained that they are part of the company's ERP rollout, the IS team wants to spread the word, by educating business units and by using year 2000 lessons to move knowledge throughout the supply chain. Chiazza wants everyone to make time for the painful questions that start with "what if."

Picking at the Pieces

In the late 1980s, while Kodak's then-CIO Katherine Hudson was famously deciding to outsource the company's mainframes (see

"Outsourcing Anxieties"), a companywide disaster recovery program was quietly being born. Kodak had a patchwork of plans in place, with some testing and offsite storage of vital records, but no verified recovery program. Realizing that the company had come to rely on IT's infrastructure and that the CIO was expected to protect it, Hudson asked Corcoran, then information security administrator, to conduct a study identifying the biggest risks of potential disasters and the cost of mitigating them.

Based on that report, Hudson started building a formal disaster recovery program, beginning with the most vulnerable parts of IS, at this behemoth manufacturing company that sells photographic supplies to everyone from consumers to NASA. Only 18 months and

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