… awareness and learning – BCAW 2011

Business Continuity Awareness Week continues … what did you do to raise awareness, or even your own level of knowledge yesterday?

Here is an interesting addition to the BCI definition of Business Continuity which you can find via the BCAW Website.

“Business Continuity Management is defined as an holistic management process that identifies potential impacts that threaten an organisation and provides a framework for building resilience with the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation and value creating activities.

Its primary objective is to allow the Top Management of an organisation to continue to manage their business under adverse conditions, by the introduction of appropriate resilience strategies, recovery objectives, business continuity and crisis management plans in collaboration with, or as a key component of, an integrated risk management initiative.”

I tried a global search on the GPG (2010 version) and did not find this, so it would seem this is something new to learn. A wonderful boost to BC Awareness, the old idea that a ‘BC Team’- or even worse – the BC Manager, would run the company in a crisis was certainly limiting the attention of Senior Management on the issue.

Also good to see the reconciliation with the risk family – AS 5050 may be starting to bite!

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I tuned into the webcast “Why do Business Continuity” last night. Essentially there were two areas discussed;

• Executive views around the value of BCM
  • Just a teaser really, key message was they are not really looking for the recovery from the unlikely (Black Swan) event.
    • Mainly looking for risk, reputation and governance issues – and resilient operations where these can deliver competative advantage
  • If you are interested in finding out about the Executive view tune into Rick Cudworth’s webcast tomorrow – where this survey will be covered in more detail
• The idea of Formal vs Informal BCM.
  • Many firms are doing some aspects of BCM but not calling it that
    • e.g. not following the BCI Lifecycle or based on a standard or the GPG
  • This followed on to the idea of a Tipping Point
    • Which was around the 51-250 staff. Larger orgs more likely to have formal BCM than smaller
  • Intersting that they found the same type of things as Amy Lee did in her research in New Zealand.
    • Bigger and Government more likely to have formal, planning processes
    • Smaller and Private more likely to have informal (or say they rely on Agile Responses).

You can find the Tuesday webcast schedule here, hope you find something of interest.

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Finally, the discussion paper on ‘Managing for Resilience is also published and available via the BCAW ‘Resources Page – mandatory reading for all as I was part of the Working Group that developed the paper.

Would love to hear your views on this paper.

You can comment here, or even better join the discussion at the BCAW LinkedIn Group.

Read, interact and learn this week – raising awareness in others is just not enough.

What area of your professional knowledge should you try to improve this week?