I recently read an article by Michael Herrera which describes his companies approach to assessing the maturity of an organisations business continuity programme. His companies approach is similar to a number of assessment which I’ve seen published over the past few months. The idea of metrics being applied to business continuity is currently the hot topic amongst the continurati and this years symposium is likely to be packed with performance indicators and frameworks. From the approaches that have been suggested thus far, there is a danger that some parts of the industry may be focussing on the wrong measures.
I don’t discount the need for metrics relating to the BCM process, but you have to be very careful about what these metrics are actually telling us. Take Michael’s Current State Assessment model as an example. This sort of assessment is useful but only in terms of understanding programme maturity; a fact which Michael himself iterates a number of times. We do have to be careful that we do not interpret a good scoring on such assessments as a measure of improved resilience. A good result simply states that you have implemented a comprehensive process, not that the execution of the process has delivered a benefit to the business. As we have stated before the goal of business continuity is to improve the resilience of your organisation. Obviously any measure of the efficacy of the process should be a measure of the resilience of the organisation.
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