Business Continuity Management - An overview

Business Continuity Management - An overview.
While bombs, fires and floods capture the headlines, almost 90 percent of business crises are nowhere near as dramatic. It is these quiet catastrophes that have the potential to damage our organisation’s most valuable assets; its processes, information and knowledge, its brand and reputation. These can be destroyed very quickly unless strongly defended at times when the speed and scale of events can overwhelm normal operational and management systems.

Recent research has suggested that, on average, 20 percent of all organisations will experience some form of unplanned event once every five years. Whilst it is unlikely to be as catastrophic as 9/11, there is still the need to think about how you would cope with the more mundane events, such as power cuts or transport problems.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a holistic management process that identifies potential impacts that threaten key organisational resources and provides a framework for building resilience and the capability to support these essential key organisational resources and activities during a disruption.

Most strategies and decisions are based on an assumption of the organisation continuing. An event that violates this assumption is a significant occurance, impinging directly on its ability to fulfil its objectives. BCM therefore, forms an integral part of our risk management strategy. It establishes cost-effective treatments should a disruption occur. Depending on its nature, a disruption will have a greater or lesser chance of occurance (Likelihood) and a greater or lesser office impact (Consequence).

Any BCM framework should be aimed at everybody within an Office, as its objective is to ensure uninterrupted availability of key organisational resources and activities required to support essential business activities. BCM differs from disaster recovery in that it is about continuity of all key processes, resources and activities, extending beyond just IT systems.