Earlier in the week I joined a webinar “Business Continuity in the 21st Century” to find out what this new age approach to continuity consisted of.
This was the most recent webinar organised by John Orlando and the Norwich University BC Program. I posted about an earlier seminar here.
This session was basically a lecture by John Stagl, with some limited Q&A. Unfortunately the questions were not audible over the internet only the answers, also the Q&A was in the middle of the session.
Stagl offered an interesting view of what constituted Business Continuity and how it differed from Disaster Recovery. Essentially BC is the continuous, proactive approach to ensuring that your organisation stays in business continuously. Its focus is not limited to disruptive events, but would include financial and markets changes.
Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is reactionary. It is triggered by a disruptive event (I guess the more traditional kind).
Unusual definitions hardly seem enough to warrant getting up at 4am (for the Non-North American audience).
Stagl was promoting two ideas that caught my interest, mainly because they are a significant part of my own perspective on this field. What follows is a blend of the two perspectives, rather than reporting what he actually said during the webinar.
Strategic planning (and to some extent planning in general) is much more Art than Science. And we need to be conducting more strategic-level engagement and planning to build resilience. Have you read an international standard for strategic planning lately?
One of my great laments is that BC Management is a discipline that is rarely practised by managers, and is more operational and tactical in its planning as a result of the lack of management experience.
Stagl comes to this thinking slightly differently, but makes an interesting point about the ‘Best Practice’ approach. He positions the source of Best Practice thinking in Fredric Winslow Taylor and the Scientific Management School. Stagl contrasts the situation of that era with the Service Economy of today. The key to success is no longer repetitive procedures.
The 21st Century environment is dynamic, and the idea of a single best way to complete an Art is nonsense. As Stagl says, when no two companies have the same staff, investors, operating culture, etc then it seems bizarre that they should plan the same way.
As it turns out this is not a brand new perspective from Stagl, you can read a lot of the ideas here. After all the 21st Century has been going for 10 years! Follow that up with a Google search that will deliver some of the slides he used – all of which would have effectively time shifted the webinar for me.
I need the equivalent of a video recorder for these things!
Credit to John Orlando who is trying to make this discipline/art/practice confront itself and build an academic tradition.
Are there many academic or intellectual Risk/BC folk out there? I posed this question once before, I suspect the answer is still very few.
Anybody else take in the webinar? Your thoughts?
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