… the lack of a career path in BCM

I read an interesting article this week from Nathanial Forbes’ blog – “Is the BCM profession a dead end?”

He is a BC Professional based in Singapore. While he makes his comments about his experiences with the profession in Asia, I think a number of his comments will resonate with BC people in other parts of the world.

After 14 years plying his trade in this game Nathaniel sees a fairly boring future, of limited opportunity.

• Not engaged in strategic decision making.
• Do routine, underfunded, often meaningless work
• Minimal chance of climbing the corporate ladder
• Professional conferences cancelled due to lack of support

His view is that within 10 years there will not be a BC department/silo in major organisations. As he sums up in his final sentence – “The value of a Department of Extraordinarily Unlikely Events, however, is lower than ever, and headed south.”

Is this an extreme view? Perhaps not – I have seen the same all over the world.

Hopefully he is correct about the practice of Heritage BC Planning, which seems to be a lot of what he is talking about.

If there are any regular readers out there, you may recall my earlier post on Heritage BC. It sounds to me like Mr Forbes is encountering a lot of this type of BC – and this approach should not be allowed to last another 10 years. Bottom-up template planning is generally irrelevant to Executive management, of course they are unlikely to vote big budgets or take much interest. Even worse when these BC people try to tell the Exec how they should run the company in a crisis!

All over the world, not just in Asia, you will find people taking the approach that a BCM Department is the purveyor of templates and is there to oversee and report on a process. I have first-hand experience of organisations where the BC Department have actively shunned any meaningful role in dealing with “BAU-style” disruprtions.

This assumption is fairly prevalent in the Forbes post – that a BCM Department has no role in the incidents and outages that happen on a day-to-day basis. They are only called into play when asteroids hit or the end of the world is nigh. If that is why you and your BC department exist – then you should be abolished.

This is close to the core of the problem – if your BCM Department actually doesnt do ‘management’, and has no role in the ongoing operations, then it will become increasingly irrelevant. A disruptive event can escalate it does not have to happen all at once – BCM is about being proactive and looking at reducing the likelihood and impact of disruptions. How can you do that if you are not engaged in these BAU incidents.

Sure you dont have to fix them but you can be engaged, however it requires an activist BCM Department;

• Engage with line management about the operational disruption issues that matter to them on a day-to-day basis
  • Management, not the local ‘BC Coordinator’
• When an incident occurs establish a “Watch Desk” to escalate the situation if the responders do not deal with it quickly enough
  • Yes, you may have to tread on somebodies toes when you escalate
  • IT are often the worst offenders of not escalating quickly enough
• Conduct “After Action Reviews” of every significant incident – apply the learning to your BC Program, perhaps the outage can be avoided or reduced next time
• Do some real ‘management of risk’ instead of ‘risk register maintenance’

An activist central BC Department does not assume that each business unit has to “do BC” for themselves. That just makes you a Corporate overhead – and then you get cut in the tough times.

Compare this with the subject of another of my earlier posts about the need for new skills in BCM. Here we had an article that asserted the BC Profession needed new skills in order to follow a new path. The total opposite in some ways to what Forbes is describing, these new resilience professionals being seen as partners with the business and providing strategic advice.

Most importantly – these new BC/resilience Managers are engaged in improving the day-to-day operations.

Important to note, we needed new skills, and perhaps some new BC Managers to achieve this.

If we want a future for a BC Profession then we have to fundamentally change what we see as BCM practice. We need to put more effort into ensuring that we are ‘managing the continuity of the business’ – and less into operating a governance process called BCM.

So, is this profession going anywhere?

Where do you stand on the BC sits under Risk – Risk sits under BC debate?

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