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… a professional’s lament

March 10, 2010 By 4 Comments

I read a lot of BCM-related websites, and I am subscribed to too many mailing lists and RSS feeds on the subject. With a lot of the content I just hit the delete key. However when the name Tim Armit comes up on on any of these sources I sit up and pay attention.

Tim speaks his mind, and his opinions are based on considerable experience and good understanding of what this BCM game is really about.

This article from Tim on Continuity Central, entitled “Have we lost sight of the bigger picture” is a must read for everybody who has any interest in BCM.  Just click through and read it please – come back and read the rest of this post later if you want.

I share Tim’s despair at the state of the art of BC. But I am not surprised by the situation he describes.

BCM is not currently about the continuity of operation of a business. It has become something else – more focussed on the management system and the certification of that system than the capability to deal with an incident and recover.

In other posts on this blog I have suggested that resilience may just be BCM done properly. Perhaps BCM is a lost cause (or a lost discipline) and we need something to replace it.

It also reminds me of Nathaniel Forbes recent lament about the lack of a career path in BCM. In many ways the problem is driven by the same processes and outcomes that are not valued by the business leadership.

Over at the DRJ Blogs I responded to a post and asserted that ‘resilience’ should address economic downturns. That position was rejected as not being the province of BCM. It is not surprising to me that Tim has BC Managers from failed companies telling him the same thing.

Sure Risk Management could be considered the ‘big picture’ discipline, but BC Planning is supposed to be a mitigation for residual risk. We have become too focussed on the historic risk approach of looking at probability more than impact. Even Risk Management has changed its own focus in ISO31000 to look more at impacts.

The situation Tim describes with the UK Financial Sector is truly appalling. How long before others countries follow suit? Not long I would suggest – this will enable them to have a safe process to get compliance ticks.

Well said Tim, but I am not optimistic that too many are really listening.

What do you think?

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  • http://www.jamesjdonnelly.com/ jamesjdonnelly

    Great post, Ken. I hope you don't mind, but I made an analogy to what we face in crisis/reputation management over at my blog. Here is the link: http://www.jamesjdonnelly.com/2010/03/sharing-a…

  • Ken Simpson

    No problem at all, glad you found it useful.

    As your post highlights there are similar concerns in different disciplines. BCM and CM tend to hand-in-hand a lot of the time anyway.

    I have already subscribed to your feed, looking forward to future posts.

  • Patrick Jodas

    I never heard of Tim before so I googled him and read a few of his other articles. After reading this one, it does not surprise me – but it does reinforce the idea that its not just about physical disasters. I truly believe that these examples could have been handled differently – the reason why they failed is because of a lack of planning. Banks should do liquidity contingency planning; Eurostar should be doing scenario development on risks that it is faced, not just physical but other related risks – eg no power.

    The challenge in today’s world is about keeping BCM alive, holistic and in the forefront – if an organisation does it properly then as BCM practitioners you will not be faced with management fatigue around BCM – stretching the boundaries into proper scenario analysis and developing and exercise plans accordingly will better position the organisation to be at the forefront and be a leader with its business continuity planing.

    I guess that at the end of the day – there is a large number of practitioners that aim to check the box and say its all done “we have BCM in place” and then there are practitioners that keep raising the bar and continuously move and prepare the organisation. A key aspect of BCM must be to monitor the future/forward trends affecting the organisation and to plan against this. This means that most often being a fireman or ex army may simply not be sufficient – you need to work closely with senior executives, understand the strategy and be able to influence the decisions. Of course it becomes easier to do this when you have been able to demonstrate an effective track record in raising the firm’s preparedness.

  • Ken Simpson

    Well said Pat,

    I guess the other important point about keeping BC fresh and raising the level, as Tim pointed out, is to ensure that your company stays in business.