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Shedding light on the complex art of business continuity planning

24 November 2005

Recent events such as the numerous hurricanes in north and central America, the earthquake on the sub-continent, and bombings in Bali and London, have once again raised the profile of business continuity and risk management for organisations.

While these emergencies bring home the message that large scale events can and will cripple an organisation, it is the more frequent medium-to-small scale events (which can escalate) that often expose the lack of an effective and current business continuity planning (BCP) strategy.

To ensure its business continuity (BC) process ably supports its service provision for critical government and business infrastructure and its own operations, CITEC has recently appointed Chris Howells as BC Manager.

Chris sees BCM as the ‘complex art’ of making sure the business continues in the face of the unexpected.

“Sometimes this is with IT solutions, sometimes it’s making sure there are alternate processes in place or making sure we have access to the right people,” she said.

Chris sees her role as looking at the environment the business operates in, reviewing the risks the organisation faces, and understanding the business functions it uses to produce products and services.

“All of this information comes together in various documents and processes that need to be reviewed, maintained and tested,” she said.

“The BC manager doesn’t do this all on their own, but takes the organisation on a journey from business continuity being another thing we do, to ‘it’s just the way we do things’.

Are we there yet?

“Like all journeys, I often hear ‘are we there yet?’ and the answer is that even though you never really get there, CITEC’s BC planning is well and truly underway,” she said.

Chris said BCM planning in the past often concentrated on essentially internal issues, where a company’s infrastructure or part thereof was assumed to be unavailable.

“In many BC strategies there was the implied assumption that surrounding infrastructure would normally be available,” she said.

“In the London bombing, the reverse was true. Organisational infrastructure was intact, but the demands on, and subsequent partial collapse of, telephony systems combined with road closures and the unavailability of transport networks caused massive disruption. This has led many organisations to a subsequent and hasty revision of their BC plans.

“The lesson to learn from this is that a business should plan for the worst and hope for the best.

“When exercising your BCP, the business should consider inviting ‘outsiders’ to participate. If you outsource, they can help gauge how your technology will be supported and how your staff would interface with relevant emergency services. They may also help you predict how soon your organisation would be able to resume normal business processes.

“By viewing BCP through the lens of ITIL - people, process, technology - you will cover most contingencies and the end result will be a resilient plan.”