Why Business Continuity Should Be At The Top Of Your Board's Agenda To Maximise Survivability In Today's Economy.

Responsible directors are finally realising the benefits of designing a business continuity management system as a way of improving their commercial advantage and assuring customers of their ability to supply. With business failures routinely appearing in the media, isn't it time that your business joined them?

Business Continuity has emerged in the previous 6 years as a vital part of top-class management for public and profit-making organizations of all shapes and sizes.

Increasingly we are observing significant, established institutions go to the wall because they have failed to anticipate and practice for significant disruption and loss. So what can business owners and directors do to ensure their firm will survive in these difficult market conditions?

Thankfully there are both business continuity processes and providers available to help business managers protect their company from the gamut of hazards and threats they face; but where do you begin?

Most organizations find that it's best to decide as a board that business continuity is vital to your organization and then put some resources behind that decision.

With funding in place, you should determine a timetable for improving your organization's resilience to disruptions and communicate the scope of products and services that the business continuity programme will cover to help clarify the work expected from the team that you appoint to create your business continuity policies, strategies and plans.

If you lack business continuity expertise in house, you may wish to look to the marketplace for suitable providers with a proven track record in the development and delivery of business continuity management services for businesses of your size.

With your team in place, you'll need to begin by identifying your most essential products and services; the things that bring most of your revenue or have the biggest impact if they are delivered or not). Most organizations find that about 20% of services produce 80% of the benefits that accrue to the organization and those they serve so it's sensible to get to grips with these initially.

Once these critical products and services are captured the team needs to look at the teams, equipment and processes that are needed to deliver them; including the supply of raw materials, utilities, people, data and operational sites.

With the business processes mapped out for each critical product or service, you should look for vulnerabilities within those processes and figure out how they would affect the quality of supply if they occurred.

Once you realise where your business is vulnerable you can create draft strategies and plans to reduce the risk of those disruptions occurring or their impact: for example if a product depends on availability of electrical power, you might install alternative supplies from another switchboard or emergency generators.

The nature and extent of the strategies and plans you agree will be determined by the perceived importance of the product or service and your budget you may need to establish incident response plans first to militate the disruption whilst you work on developing the degree of resilience needed to rule out foreseeable disruptions.

Often you can considerably lessen the potential loss to your organization's outputs by spending a few days thinking through the "what-ifs" so it makes evident sense to do so; whether you are driven by legislation, commercial forces or straightforward common-sense.

Go to it today, before life's vagaries make you wish you had not delayed in making decisions about putting a suitable business continuity management organisation in place.

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