Case Scenario:
The North Palm Company sells its own brand of shoes via its Web site. The company is owned and operated by a small family consisting of Maria and Henry Rodriguez, the husband and wife, and their 25-year-old son Jeremy Rodriguez.
Jeremy has some understanding of Web development but not enough to do things himself. So the Rodriguez family contracted with a local company who provides turnkey Web based storefronts.
The Web site has been working well for several months, and every week the number of orders continued to grow. Both Maria and Henry were ecstatic with all the money they were making. They were continually amazed how with a tiny office and an inexpensive computer they make enough money to live comfortably.
Things changed, however, one Monday morning when Maria tried to access the orders that had arrived over the weekend. The problem was that there was not one single order in the system.
Jeremy Rodriguez investigated, and by noon he had to come to realize that their home page had been replaced by a picture of a crazy-looking stuffed duck and a banner message that said. “Hackers Unite. Free the Web.”
Desperate, Maria Rodriguez called their Web developer, who was out of the office for unexplained reasons. She left a message for him to return the call and that it was very urgent.
The whole afternoon went by and still no more orders, and no call back from the Web developer. Henry called the developer six times, until the developer’s secretary became angry. Finally, Henry Rodriguez became so agitated that he drove to the developer’s office and caused a minor scene, but the developer was still nowhere to be found.
At 9:00am the next morning the developer returned the call and said, “I’ll give it my highest priority this morning.
The whole morning went by without word form the developer. So Henry called the man’s office again, and to his surprise the developer himself answered on the first ring.
“Have you figured out the problem?” asked Henry Rodriguez.
“To make a long story short no, “said the developer.
Henry was mortified. “this is killing us.” He said. “We’ll lose all our customers, and we have not one penny in sales now”
“I understand,” said the developer. “The only problem is that about 30 of my customers have the same problem as you. I’ve been trying to repair some of their sites today, but it seems that the hackers managed to infect the Web servers with some terrible new virus. It is going to take two to four weeks to get everyone going again.
Things got even worse, and by Wednesday several other merchants had filed lawsuits against the developer. Maria Rodriguez heard about the lawsuits late that day form a friend who worked at the newspaper office, and she called the developer the first thing Thursday morning, only to find that the telephone was disconnected.
In a panic she went to another Web developer, who promptly told her that she had been the victim of a sophisticated multilevel marketing scam. The people involved had all been selling the same prepackaged Web storefront, which they had actually stolen form a legitimate company. To make things worse, they had installed every customer’s Web site on an insecure server, with almost no access restrictions. Anyone could modify anyone else’s Web site without even entering any account and password information.
Reluctantly, Maria wrote the new developer a check for $5,000 for him to get started on creating a new Web site, but the developer cautioned them it would take at least two days because he had to transfer North Palm’s domain name, www.northpalmshoes1.com to his server.
Maria and Henry signed a contract with the new developer and went home feeling better. “That took every penny form our bank account,” said Maria. “Now I don’t even have enough cash to pay the mortgage on our house or any of the bills this month.”
“Don’t worry,” said Henry, “the money will start coming in again in a couple of days as soon as we get our new site up and running.”
Two days later they got a call from the new developer. “Bad news,” he said. “I can’t transfer your domain name because it is registered in the name of your previous developer. So technically the name belongs to him and not you.”
The developer sighed. “There’s only one thing you can do to get things moving quickly. Start over. You can e-mail al your old customers about your Web site.
Henry and Maria thought for a few seconds. Then Maria realized that all the customer files were stored on the server. The developer had convinced them that the server was the safest place to keep al the files, because the developer did tape backups of the server several times a day.
The Rodriguez family ended up in personal bankruptcy and lost everything including their house and car. In the end, they were forced to move in with Maria’s parents in Miami.
Question 1: Could the Rodriguez family have prevented al their problems? How?
Question 2: Prepare a lsit of all the mistakes that the Rodriguez family made.
Question 3: For each mistake, make a positive suggestion as to what should have been done instead.