The shoemaker’s kids don’t have shoes.

I’ve been known to apply that old saw to lots of situations. Friends get angry at me when I do it, clients pay me to teach them about making sure they have shoes of their own, and because I’m human I’m as guilty as anyone; the things I’m best at teaching to others I don’t always handle well for myself.

What do you do when Google shuts you down?

Chris Brogan, one of the business-gurus-of-the-moment, is going through it right now. I’ve scolded him in a comment on that post, and now I hope I can teach you something that Chris really should have known:

In business you always need to have a backup plan.

Chris has every right to be frustrated by all of his stuff suddenly not working. And hey: Google really does owe  us a way to recover without having to cross a border (Europe for a week, anyone? At least Chris Brogan’s story has him in driving distance).

And Google could even make money at giving us a backup plan for when they screw up, although I’m sure we’d all then accuse them of breaking things on purpose so they could charge for premium support on something that we thought was free.

But at the end of the day the story is that any time you put all your eggs in one basket you’re asking for trouble. I’m not just talking about data backups, by the way; I’m talking REAL redundancy. What Chris describes is like a company having one connection to the internet and then trying to blame the ISP for lost business when service goes out.

With so much of your business now run “in the cloud”, do you have a plan to keep moving if things stop working? And a way to implement that plan?

That’s what Business Process is all about.