What Does it Take for Organisations to Adopt Business Continuity Management?

What Does it Take for Organisations to Adopt Business Continuity Management?

The last 12 months have seen major disruptions to businesses in the UK including heavy snowfalls, frozen roads, floods, postal strikes, and swine flu.

Major businesses were able to implement their business continuity plans and move out of the affected areas to work-area recovery locations.  Data centres were able to keep running and remote working enabled many employees to maintain their activities.  Initial evidence suggests that it was the smaller businesses that were the most severely impacted. 

Would Business Continuity Management (BCM) have helped these organisations?  Can they plan for the impacts of such a widespread incident?  I believe they can.

There are many reasons that SMEs give for not implementing BCM.  The Research undertaken by Henley Management College found that SMEs would not plan because of the following assumptions:

Lack of resources - the assumption that the business cannot afford the costs or management time to make continuity plans.

Lack of impact estimation - the assumption that the business will be able to survive the period of interruption, both financially and in terms of customer tolerance.

Lack of probability/scenario planning - the assumption that many problems are either too small to matter or too large to deal with, and that those within a conceptual ‘comfort zone' will be manageable as they happen.

Lack of prioritisation - the assumption that if a crisis hasn't happened yet, it's not urgent enough to plan for.

As SMEs are a critical part of the UK economy it is important to counter these assumptions. 

Current BCM best practice as set out in BS25999 minimises the time required to develop BC plans, concentrating on maintaining the most critical of the organisation's activities.  The time invested in developing BCM based on BS25999 will be little compared with the time and costs required to recover business lost through disruptions. 

The inability to maintain business during an extended disruption places considerable strain on the cash flow of any organisation.  During the current economic conditions many SMEs are seeking extended lines of credit.  They will receive a more sympathetic hearing if they can demonstrate they have BC plans to continue key activities, thus protecting their customer base.

To assume that customers will be loyal to an organisation whilst it rebuilds following a disruption is dangerous.  Whilst those in the immediate area will be sympathetic in the short term there are plenty of competitors ready to take the business away.

The recent events in the UK have demonstrated that we do not know what will disrupt an organisation.  It is far better to base planning on high-level scenarios, denial of access, lack of staff, failure of systems and of key supplies.  Whilst acknowledging that people will make every effort to overcome the affects of a major disruption it will be those who already have plans in place who will be back in business sooner and be able to exploit the marketplace.

For more information regarding the above or to discuss your business continuity management please contact Marmalade Box on 0845 313 0205, visit https://www.marmaladebox.com/ or view the blog at www.securityspecialist.co.uk


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