______________________________________________
From: Buffaloe, Ron
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2005 8:48 PM
To: Blatchford, Mark
Subject: Further Systems Problems

Mark:

This past Tuesday, the day after a holiday, the field again experienced
severe problems in accessing a number of programs that we use in production,
both mainframe based and WEB based programs. Infocast messages were posted
intermittently but were not highly detailed in providing information.
Because of the VIP download over the weekend, field assumptions were that
yet another major download had made our systems unusable. It was not until
Thursday that we learned the true extent of the problems. This was through
a communication from Phil Becker to the Executive Staff that was forwarded
from one Regional Office to its field offices.

There are a couple of areas where we believe that communication could have
been significantly improved:

1. Information regarding the downage could have been pushed to the
users' desk top so that they would know the problem was being addressed.
2. Information could have been more detailed and more extensive during
the day.
3. Information furnished to the executive staff should have been
directly shared with managers and end users.

One of our concerns was that Infocast was stating the problem was clearing
up when there were major problems still occurring in the afternoon.
Infocast did not state correctly which regions were still having problems.
For example there was no indication that the Chicago Region still had a
problem on Infocast. Yet when a CAPRS was called in the person answering
stated "Aren't you aware the entire nation is down?"

A Chicago Region District Manager stated:

"The Infocast told some of the story but not all the story and it definitely
was not updated in the afternoon as we were down most of the time. They
need to look at all their infocast messages after the fact and compare them
to what was going on nationally that day. It was incomplete. In the
afternoon many people who waited and waited for service left because the
systems was so slow we couldn't help them out. We can only imagine the
number of people who made an effort to visit an office that day or called us
that were frustrated by our service, especially if they drove in with the
price of gasoline and couldn't get service."

A District Manager on the West Coast shared this information:

"By the time the problem starts the west coast has read the messages and
doesn't bother reporting; we wait until they finally update it to call in.
We had offices that were down first thing in the morning and stayed down all
day. In this office it was primarily a top secret problem and folks
couldn't log in - some could and come couldn't. Later in the day it was
everything: I couldn't get into web sites, my pin was suspended in the
middle of what I was doing, programs throughout the day began to crash, and
at 3:30 PDT MSSICS was down for the count here. It came up again about a
half an hour later so that would be problem resolved maybe by 7 pm eastern
time."

We understand each system outage has its own unique problems. And this
particular one with expired Top Secret certificates does not shed the best
light on us. We can only hope that we will see improved systems
availability and fewer of these major outages.

We do hope that communications can be improved in the areas that we have
highlighted and would appreciate any assistance you can provide in making
sure that happens.

Ron