The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

by Gene Kim

“A couple of years ago, probably during budgeting season, some bean counter looked at those three networking vendors and decided to consolidate them down to one switch. Sort of makes sense, right?” he continues. “So without asking anyone, they went ahead and did it. And not just in one plant, but in a bunch of the plants. They replaced the three switches with one bigger, beefier switch, and then moved all plant traffic onto it,” Dwayne says. “But what they didn’t know was that they had three separate outsourcers managing the three different networks. So now all three outsourcers who used to work on their own separate switches had to work on one switch and were suddenly stepping on each other’s toes all the time. “Within a week, one of the manufacturing plants had their entire network knocked offline—absolutely nothing from inside the plant could talk with the outside world. No one could get plant scheduling information, no one could send out replenishment orders, equipment couldn’t get maintenance updates … All interfaces were dead!” Dwayne continues, still clearly in awe of the scale of the outage. “The only thing that worked was the fax machine. Everyone from every department had to wait in line to send out things like weekly production reports to management, orders for raw materials …” Dwayne says. Maxine bursts out laughing. “I remember that—it was incredible. We had to buy some USB printers from the local office supply store for a couple of systems that couldn’t conne...