A few weeks ago I wrote about the consequences of services dependent upon electronic components that have a tendency to become unavailable in an emergency. It’s a fairly simple thesis, we depend on technology in such a broad spectrum of devices and services that when power is unavailable reliance on technology becomes a seizure point.
Last night our power went out for a couple of hours, nothing major but right at dinner time so it ended up being more than a minor inconvenience. I went on PG&E’s website using my smartphone and found a link for an “outage map”, which I clicked on hoping to get status. Hoping…
As it turns out the PG&E website is, apparently, not available in a mobile format and the pages I needed to get to were irreparably formatted and the map itself was unresponsive on my Android device. In other words, the “outage map” page and related services on the PG&E website were unusable and offered no utility.
Here’s what I can’t quite square away, it stands to reason that in a power outage the device you would not have available to you is a desktop computer, which even if a laptop powered by a battery would not have network access due to the dependency on routers and cable/DSL modems which are powered by line current. If the PG&E customer most affected by outage status updates is the person suffering the outage, why would you give them a web service they are unable to use on the one device that would likely be available to them, a smartphone?
From a systems design standpoint we, collectively, are going to need to fundamentally rethink how we build and deliver services that have many points of failure but also have utility in a context of how someone is likely to be using it at the moment it should be delivering critical value.
See comment below post
(Cross-posted @ Venture Chronicles)
Jeff, I took the liberty of adding the above image – note the date: it’s almost two years old. Would you believe PG&E responded to me saying mobile outage map was one of their priorities?
Ironically, the level of information they present is really useful, even well organized… except you can’t access it when you actually need it.