Agile Business Continuity

Please note that I said that Business Continuity is simple, I didn’t say it was easy. Business Continuity is indeed a simple process to understand, it is the implementation that is difficult. Anyone who is familiar with either the BCI Good Practise Guide or the British Standard can provide a fairly comprehensive overview in less than 5 minutes. The problem in implementing it is one of scale not necessarily complexity. In the types of organisation we find ourselves working with there will be approximately 100 to 200 champions involved in the continuity management process. The real challenge is to put in place a process that monitors and co-ordinates the actions of this community within the organisation.

Some organisations have attempted to solve this challenge by getting a third party  to execute the process and to write plans. As discussed previously this is driven by the unfortunate result of not focussing on the correct goal. Is is not the plans that are important but the implementation of a repeatable process. You could of course get the third party in to repeat the exercise each year, but this won’t get you many brownie points with the BS25999 auditors.