Executive Summary
A perfect system does not exist, and breaches are expected occurrences. Company leaders must be ready for breaches and create a plan for their management well in advance. The case of SimplePay is a demonstration of the magnitude of damage that lack of crisis planning and management skills can do to an organization. A clear step-by-step crisis management plan is presented in this report for use in solving the root cause of the problem.
Statement of Immediate Problem(s)
Root Cause of Problem
The actual root cause of the issue is poor risk management. Jake is right that IT specialists cannot seal all the loopholes, so system breaches are expected occurrences. However, he did not focus his energy on developing a crisis plan strategy that sets out a clear management pathway for such kind of risk. SimplePay halted its operations for 42 hours (Seitjs, 2015) because of the lack of a risk management plan that would have enabled the company to sort out the issue immediately.
Other potential causes include lack of proper leadership, poor teamwork, or lack of synergy, which saw Jesse’s team working slowly, and, shifting the focus to the impending IPO to the detriment of internal systems.