CS@Worcester   CS-343   Week-14

Why I chose this post

I chose this post because the author touches on an important topic, resilience, which is a term that I have heard before in relation to IT related fields but I have never really taken time to understand it or even know how it is applied. Again Uwe Friedrichsen gives relevant examples as he covers this topic. He gives examples both within the IT sphere and some examples outside IT making resilience as a concept easier to understand.

Summary of post

The author begins by defining resilience, “resilience means that a system can ideally withstand adverse external influences completely or at least recover from them quickly.” Adverse effects can range anywhere from external influences from illness, overload situation, a pandemic, extreme weather and so on.

Friedrichsen gives an example of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected German car manufacturers. Since they had found an efficent way of procuring car parts, they became dependetn on chip makers in Taiwan. And in a figure of speech he says that, “ they have put all their money on a single horse and expect that this horse will always be the first to cross the finish line. And their calculation already includes the prize money for the horse.” This show how reliant car manufacturers had become dependent on Taiwanesse chip makers. However, when COVID hit the supply chain was greatly affected.

The author then shows the delicate balance that exists between efficiency and resilience, he also shows that a highly efficient systems is also very highly rigid. A balance must exist by reducing the efficiency in order to maximize on th resilience of a system. In the post industrial world the author says that he has witnessed a lot of uncertainity and full control of varience has become hard. We should therefore as early as we could begin to embrace the fact that there might be adverse situations down the road

Reflections and application

The blog offers a lot of important advice for the age and time that we live in. Due to the inconsistent nature of systems and resources in the world we live in today it is foolish to be single minded, despite the security that you may enjoy for the brief period when disaster strikes it will be hard to recover.

In my personal life and even in my career, this will be an important principle to live by.