Agile Business Continuity

Once upon a time there was an IT director of a financial services organisation who really believed that the organisation should focus on resilience. So much so that he would regularly tour the different sites throughout Europe and challenge each Head of Department with a single question.

Your email system has just gone down and it won’t back for a week. What do you do ?

When I first heard this story a few months back I immediately wished that every IT Director was as focussed on the businesses resilience. There is however an underlying problem; not with the question but with the person who is asking it.

IT, like Finance and HR, are for the most part internal suppliers. There job is to supply based on the demands and requirements of the organisation. Challenging the organisation as to how they should react when your service is unavailable is actually a little cheeky.

If the question were asked of me, my immediate response may well have been, “Well nothing, because if email was that important to the business, it wouldn’t have gone down”.

Passing the buck from the internal supplier back up to the internal client is a common pattern. After all, the client doesn’t entirely understand the complexity of what is being provided and rarely has the option to get the service from a third party. A case of the arrogance of IT versus the ignorance of the business.

To develop a resilient approach, both sides need to understand the nature of what is being delivered and the value it has for the business. I would suggest that it is only from this starting point that risks can be identified and mitigation strategies can be formed.