As a continuation of my riff from Monday: During a project I ran many many years ago we delivered a dependency model to a large retail bank. As an aside I have yet to mention that I am probably the world’s foremost experts on dependency modelling, but then again only because no one else has that much interest in the subject. I’m claiming this title on the basis that any other works on the subject seem to be cut and paste from my own white papers.
Anyway, this project mapped the organisation’s critical business activities down onto the supply chain and critical systems. The idea was to relate the value of the business being generated at the top of the business with the cost and risk generated at the bottom. We were able to construct and analyse the business in an incredibly detailed way. One of the follow on projects was to plug in their internal monitoring systems into the model, so that the business could see operational risk being realised in realtime. As a secondary benefit we quickly identified those monitoring feeds that delivered little value to the business. If the feed couldn’t fit onto the model of the business then it was delivering very little to the business. As a result the client was able to switch off somewhere in the region of 40% of their monitoring feeds. This proved to be a substantial saving that swamped the cost of the overall project.
The reason for telling this story is to express that information and the effort in gathering it has a real cost in terms of maintainance. This is especially true of business continuity, where vast quantities of information are managed by a diverse community within the business. Most of the time the value to the business cannot be expressed clearly and questions have to be asked in respect to the reason for maintaining the information. If the answer coming back is unclear, then you probably don’t need it in the first place.
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