Interesting conversations on the subjects of Risk and BCM are rare on the internet. Inane questions and responses are all too common.
It also annoys me when these rare discussions take place “behind closed doors”. The door in this case is LinkedIn Groups – the post is from John Orlando entitled “Business Continuity – Fact or Fiction?”.
Here is the link to the public post, the next link takes you to the discussion on the LinkedIn Group (Business Continuity Research).
John is the Program Director of the Masters (of Science) Degree in BC at Norwich University. He has an interesting argument in this post – and in a related post from the courses blog entitled “Is the future of Business Continuity Broad or Deep?“. John is keen for BCM to be derived from research and become a little more scientific.
Great idea. Here is a problem I have discovered – there are very few academically inclined BC folks out there. In this post I posed the question – Are there a lot of intellectual BC professionals out there? Despite that being one of the most commented posts on my blog, I think the answer to the question is no.
Partly the issue is because this is not a profession, and moving the whole body of work (and creating the body of knowledge and debate that would make it a profession) will not be done by a Good Practice Guide or ISO Standard. Again I have explored this aspect in an earlier post for reference.
“What do you think are the significant challenges facing the risk profession in Australia?”
“Our greatest challenge is that we are not really a profession and do not always behave as professionals.”
That was how Grant Purdy started his response. Grant is the Chair of the Standards Australia/New Zealand Committee on Risk Management. This is the group that led the production of AS4360, on which the bulk of ISO31000 is based
The ultimate evidence of the need for this research and academic debate is that there is another conversation going on in the Yahoo Groups on the meaning of the term DR (Disaster Recovery). There are a range of variations and unique ways in which different people use this.
I am not saying that any of these people are wrong. I just find it inane that we think that is something that constitutes a worthwhile debate in professional discipline.
Count me in for promoting the debate and thinking in this field. What about you?
Would you want to contribute to academic research to advance BC thinking?
Would you consider a post graduate degree in BC as a worthwhile investment?
Are you an intellectual BC practitioner?
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