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… Resilience Week!

November 24, 2009 By 10 Comments

Over at the Agile Business Continuity blog, Paul James has declared this week Resilience Week. He will be publishing a series of posts on the subject.

I look forward to reading and interacting with Paul’s work, I encourage others to do the same.

At the moment many people throw these ‘word concepts’ around, often with no understanding of meaning or a set of meanings that are unique to our own personal understanding. Worse still, we use these concepts interchangeably.

Just the other day I read a presentation about Enterprise Risk Management. In the introduction it said that ERM is also known as Business Continuity. I am not sure I would agree with that.

Are you interested in defining these concepts? Who benefits from keeping these concepts vague?

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  • Pauline

    I believe it is important to define these concepts and TLA’s, not only for us as practitioners, but more importantly for management and the company employee’s.
    In todays world of death by governance, senior management are being stretched to manage multiple projects across their areas, from compliance to information security and more importantly to us, businesss resilience. If there is no definition and clear understanding of each of these concepts, their purpose and end goal; management will lose commitment and creditibility will be lost. And we all know that to save a sinking ship is one of the hardest tasks there is.

    And what about the average company employee who works 9 to 5 and has all these concepts thrown at them, do they all become a blur and just another meaningless task to be performed? When a crisis hits, we cannot afford for these employee’s to wonder around aimlessly wondering if a ‘business resilience’ emergency is a new term for the latest Microsoft patch to be released.

    To be fair, a number of these concepts have interlinking theme’s, but this in-depth knowledge is where the responsibility of the BCM practioner comes to the fore and where it is up to us to guide both management and employee’s.

  • Pauline

    I believe it is important to define these concepts and TLA’s, not only for us as practitioners, but more importantly for management and the company employee’s.
    In todays world of death by governance, senior management are being stretched to manage multiple projects across their areas, from compliance to information security and more importantly to us, businesss resilience. If there is no definition and clear understanding of each of these concepts, their purpose and end goal; management will lose commitment and creditibility will be lost. And we all know that to save a sinking ship is one of the hardest tasks there is.

    And what about the average company employee who works 9 to 5 and has all these concepts thrown at them, do they all become a blur and just another meaningless task to be performed? When a crisis hits, we cannot afford for these employee’s to wonder around aimlessly wondering if a ‘business resilience’ emergency is a new term for the latest Microsoft patch to be released.

    To be fair, a number of these concepts have interlinking theme’s, but this in-depth knowledge is where the responsibility of the BCM practioner comes to the fore and where it is up to us to guide both management and employee’s.

  • http://www.agilecontinuity.org/ Paul

    Agreed. Business Continuity is just Good Business Practise, but until it can be expressed in a digestible form it is unlikely to become an integral part of any organisations culture.

    • Ken Simpson

      “digestible form”, I like that.

      Makes one wonder if the various international standards are aiding this expression of the subject in a digestible form or not?

  • http://www.agilecontinuity.org Paul

    Agreed. Business Continuity is just Good Business Practise, but until it can be expressed in a digestible form it is unlikely to become an integral part of any organisations culture.

    • Ken Simpson

      “digestible form”, I like that.

      Makes one wonder if the various international standards are aiding this expression of the subject in a digestible form or not?

  • http://www.agilecontinuity.org/ Paul

    I think you already know my opinion on this. ;-)

  • http://www.agilecontinuity.org Paul

    I think you already know my opinion on this. ;-)

  • http://www.agilecontinuity.org/ Paul

    On reflection, I don’t believe the standards are at fault here. It is those of us who seek to interpret and deliver compliant processes who need to maintain a clear picture for ourselves and our clients.

  • http://www.agilecontinuity.org Paul

    On reflection, I don’t believe the standards are at fault here. It is those of us who seek to interpret and deliver compliant processes who need to maintain a clear picture for ourselves and our clients.