… the (BC Awareness) week that was

My involvement with the awareness aspects had to take second place to the continuity of my own business this week – and unfortunately I missed the local BCI Chapter event as a consequence.

There was another webinar that I watched (on replay) over 3 sittings – “New threats, new skills, new challenges – the next 5 years” by Charlie Maclean-Bristol.

Charlie offered 5 predictions for the next 5 years, which is very safe as they have all already come to pass.

1. The nature of incidents will change
2. How we manage Incident Management will change
3. Cloud computing and Telephony will change the nature of recovery strategies
4. Supply Chain Management will become an important skill
5. The BC Managers role and skill set will have to change.

Despite all this you will be pleased to hear that BCM remains an operationally focussed thing – all about RTO’s and recovery plans – just more auditing and compliance activity to look forward to in the future.

Charlie presents very well, he speaks clearly (unlike me) and his presentation unfolded in a logical manner. If you have fairly limited exposure to actually doing BCM (as distinct from reading about it) then find the webinar and watch the replay. Just bear in mind that those 5 predictions represent things that have happened and should be shaping your thinking and action today.

And please, stop calling it “Horizon Scanning”. I blame Bruce Braes for introducing the concept at the UK BCI conference last year – I guess the ‘think out of box’, ‘out of comfort zone’ and ‘beyond single expected future’ messages have been lost in translation.

I have just spent 14 hours on an aircraft – when you scan the horizon from that height it is vast and there are many possible end points. We need to broaden our minds first, then perhaps we will actually be able to see the horizon as it should be. When viewed through the narrow lens of the ‘BCM Lifecycle’ and standardised ‘Body of Knowledge’ we constrain not only what we can see, but how far.

To see further, we need to stand on the shoulders of giants – we do that by ensuring that our craft is  informed by good theory, not blindly following common practice.

I would encourage anybody who shares my concerns about the need to develop the more general skills of BC practitioners – to help them actually become managers – come and join this discussion on the BC Eye site.

Look forward to seeing some of you next week, for a more hands-on awareness week at DRJ Spring World in Orlando.