Day 2 at BCM World Conference seemed to lack the same energy as Day 1. Plenty of people in the trade show still – but lower attendances in the Thought Leadership stream – perhaps they found the other streams more interesting.
The day started with a great keynote by Michael Pawlyn, who presented on the application of biological sciences to building design and sustainable food systems. He even went so far as to draw attention to the biological views of resilience which contrast with the engineering models currently in vogue within the risk and BC communities.
It was a shame the the numbers were well done at this session compared to the keynotes on the first day. Perhaps the late night at the Gala Dinner impacted the number of early starters.
Following this I attended the thought Leadership stream which was to have 4 presentations on the subject of resilience. While the first two were well presented and contained some useful commentary – none of the 4 had anything to do with resilience. A case study on how BCM was being implemented at IBM provided good insights and was supported by a published White paper available from their stand in the show. Key points here was offering methods to improves the strategic and business alignment aspects of BCM.
Kathleen Lucey then presented on her current research project called “Next Generation BCM” – which would have been better with more time and direct engagement with the audience afterwards. Time pressures meant that the Q&A was deferred until after lunch and the next two speakers. Unfortunately the audience fled from the following session before it finished.
Here is a case of thought leadership – what should the next generation of BC practice look like – that should warrant a more detailed examination and perhaps different presentations by speakers on the same subject to stimulate debate.
My session on using Cyber Exercises as a tool for Executive engagement was the last session of the day – partnered with Jeff Lewis from Royal Mail speaking about the BCI Executive Toolkit. Unfortunately not too many of the previous audience returned. For anybody interested the outline paper is available on the Conference web site, and the slides are available here.
I will do a mini version as a streamed presentation in coming week.
Overall the lack of engagement with the speakers struck me the most – and remember I was in the Thought Leadership sessions the whole time. Perhaps there was more questioning, discussion and engagement in the other streams. How ironic that the stream that should be promoting discussion around the future of the discipline didn’t.
The other major learning was that BC people do not have a clue about the use of Social Media. More on that in a future post.
I also left still unsure that we had an answer to the questions that Lyndon Bird posed in his recent Continuity magazine article – “Where to know for BCM?“.
What is it we bring to the party for Crisis Management, Supply Chain continuity and the broader discussion of resilience? Can we articulate this?
If not at the World Conference, then where do we meet to debate these issues?
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